Henry James

If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.

I take up my own pen again - the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself - today - I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.

The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma

It__ very silly,_ she said, __ut I go on with it in spite of myself. I__ afraid I__ too easily pleased; no novel is so silly I can__ read it.

Nothing irritates me so as the flatness of people__ imagination.

Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.

..if I dont do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether imitative, and that I have nor recently encountered any very striking models of grandeur.

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.

We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.

People are free to find out the best and the worst of me!

I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies - in great towns and great crowds. It's a plant that takes time and space and air; and London society is a huge "squash", as we elegantly call it - an elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob.

The image of the "presence," whatever it was, waiting there for him to go--this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short--he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form.

When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the denouement.

The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.

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.

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.