Quotes About Henry James

The relation in detail of one's dresses and dreams, together with plots of novels and plays one has read and seen should be made a penal offence, except perhaps to Mr. Henry James, to whom I would give the floor for a nightmare.

My interior is very, very dense - Proustian-looking, sort of Henry James. The walls are covered in pictures, and I transformed the big drawing room into a library lined with books.

The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks.

Henry James] privately characterized Roosevelt as a dangerous and ominous jingo, and the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding Noise.

Greene felt that a disaster had set in for the English novel after the death of Henry James; whereas traditional novelists had always conceived of their characters as being somehow under the eye of God, where their actions had an eternal consequence, Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster had produced characters who seemed nothing more than the sum of their drifting perceptions. This is a problem philosophers have worried about since the days of John Locke,

I liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.

I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

I can manage a prose format as long as I keep closer to Laurence Sterne than to Henry James.

My tendencies are much more the Henry James thing, where we sit in silence at the table for three minutes, and our whole lives are changed because of a revelation that never quite happens but almost bubbles to the surface.

The most terrifying thing I ever saw in a cinema, thanks to the carefully built-up drama, was in the ancient black-and-white film 'The Innocents,' based on Henry James's 'The Turn Of The Screw.' My skin actually crawled with horror.

Walker Evans said it was 'a pet subject' of his — how writers like James Joyce and Henry James were 'unconscious photographers'.

Through a story that delineates the power of words to obfuscate, exploit, and distort human reality, Henry James offers his own nuanced, precise, and sensitive prose in opposition to the dead phrases that stream from lecture halls, line the pages of newspapers, and float from one speaker to another in that arid climate that was Boston.

I have only read very classic traditional English ghost stories, other than Henry James, who wrote some magnificent short ones as well as the longer 'Turn of the Screw.' He, Dickens, and M.R. James are my influences.

It [The Great Gatsby] has interested and excited me more than any new novel I have seen, either English or American, for a number of years....it seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.

I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.

And it's impossible for me to read Henry James.

Her imagination was by habit ridiculously active; when the door was not open it jumped out the window.

There was nothing in the room the next minute but the sunshine and a sense that I must stay.

They are hopelessly vulgar. Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being 'bad' is a question for the metaphysicians. They are bad enough to dislike, at any rate; and for this short life that is quite enough.

She couldn't have told you whether it was because she was afraid, or because such a voice in the darkness seemed of necessity a boon; but she listened to him as she had never listened before; his words dropped deep into her soul.

Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.