"That accurst autobiographic form which puts a premium on the loose, the improvised, the cheap, and the easy."
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Quote collection
Henry James quotes (page 13 of 13)
251 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donn´e: our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it."
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"If we pretend to respect the artist at all we must allow him his freedom of choice , in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify."
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"Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures."
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"Though it might have its momentary alarms, paternity is not an exciting vocation."
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"Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea."
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"To treat a big subject in the intensely summarized fashion demanded by an evening's traffic of the stage when the evening, freely clipped at each end, is reduced to two hours and a half, is a feat of which the difficulty looms large."
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"I've struck up a tremendous intimacy with Conte Alberto, and we literally can't live without each other. He is the first object my eyes greet in the morning, and the last at night."
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"Am I solemn? I had an idea I was grinning from ear to ear." "You look as if you were taking me to a prayer-meeting or a funeral. If that's a grin your ears are very near together." "Should you like me to dance a hornpipe on the deck?" "Pray do, and I'll carry round your hat. It'll pay the expenses of our journey."
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"It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry."
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"The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience."
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