About Henry James: Henry James is regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.
One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.
It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.
The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.
What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.
It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.
An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.
In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.
To kill a human being is, after all, the least injury you can do him.
To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of it's process.
Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.
It has not been a successful life.' 'No -- it has only been a beautiful one.
