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I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

Henry James

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Henry James
Age: 73 †
Born: 1843
Born: January 1
Died: 1916
Died: January 1
Contributing Editor
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet Lawyer
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
New York City
New York
Henricus James
Love
Sufficiently
Justified
Theme
Writer
Hold
Literature
Writing

More quotes by Henry James

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I'm yours for ever--for ever and ever. Here I stand I'm as firm as a rock. If you'll only trust me, how little you'll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.
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The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be . . .
Henry James
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I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.
Henry James
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Excellence does not require perfection.
Henry James
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Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
Henry James
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We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.
Henry James
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Until you try, you don't know what you can't do.
Henry James
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It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
Henry James
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To say that she had a book is to say that her solitude did not press upon her for her love of knowledge had a fertilizing quality and her imagination was strong. There was at this time, however, a want of lightness in her situation, which the arrival of an unexpected visitor did much to dispel.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
Henry James
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It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.
Henry James
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All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.
Henry James
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My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter.
Henry James
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When you forget to eat, you know you're alive.
Henry James
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The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality.
Henry James
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God's creature is one. He makes man, not men. His true creature is unitary and infinite, revealing himself, indeed, in every finite form, but compromised by none.
Henry James
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Novelist-Citizen of Two Countries Interpreter of his Generation on both Sides of the Sea.
Henry James
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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.
Henry James
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I've always expected the worst, and it's always worse than I expected.
Henry James