Henry James Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.”

“However British you may be, I am more British still.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.”

“Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”