Henry James Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

  Henry James

  Writing, Doe, Reason

  Partial Portraits (1888) "Art of Fiction"

• I have performed the necessary butchery. Here is the bleeding corpse.

  Henry James

  Writing, Bleeding, Butchery

• Writing is not primarily escape, but use.

  Henry James

  Writing, Use

• The deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer...No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind.

  Henry James

  Art, Writing, Mind

• What is either a picture or a novel that is not character?

  Henry James

  Writing, Character, Novel

  Partial Portraits (1888) "Art of Fiction"

• Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications.

  Henry James

  Writing, Thinking, Evil

  "The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction".

• If I should certainly say to a novice, 'Write from experience and experience only,' I should feel that this was rather a tantalizing monition if I were not careful immediately to add, 'Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.'

  Henry James

  Writing, People, Trying

  "The Art of Fiction" (1884)

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

  Henry James

  Love, Writing, Literature

  Henry James (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry James (Illustrated)”, p.11956, Delphi Classics

• The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

  Henry James

  Country, Writing, Yield

  Letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 16 Jan. 1871

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