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One can't judge till one's forty before that we're too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.

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
Till
Ignorant
Judge
Judging
Hard
Eager
Much
Addition
Cruel
Forty

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The germ, wherever gathered, has ever been for me, the germ of a story, and most of the stories strained to shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as remote and windblown as a casual hint.
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And remember this, that if you've been hated, you've also been loved.
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Things are always different than what they might be...If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything.
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The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayad?re of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, Look at me. Illustrations, loud simplifications... bill poster advertising ? only these stand a chance.
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Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.
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Don't pass it by - the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for.
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We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generosity.
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