Henry James Quotes on Literature
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The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination... To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.
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It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
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Whatever question there may be of his [Thoreau's] talent, there can be none, I think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one; but it was eminently personal. He was imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial - he was parochial; it is only at his best that he is readable.
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There are two kinds of taste in the appreciation of imaginative literature: the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
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However incumbent it may be on most of us to do our duty, there is, in spite of a thousand narrow dogmatisms, nothing in the world that anyone is under the least obligation to like - not even (one braces one's self to risk the declaration) a particular kind of writing.
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The full, the monstrous demonstration that Tennyson was not Tennysonian.
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The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
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What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
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I caught him, yes, I held him - it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.