top of page
.png){kind=small}
"We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Literature quotes
"Shakespeare shook his head and sunk his chin into his ruff, making him look more owl-like than ever. "I have written about other worlds often enough. I have said what I can say. There are many kinds of reality. This is but one kind."
"Pages entertain me more than pictures do."
"A book lives a new life every time it is read."
"I read to know the past, I write to express my love for the future."
"I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr."
"Reading a good book helps us to feel un-alone."
"This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself - albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony - the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job."
"Considering that the modern and contemporary literature taught in most universities is largely bleak, cynical, morbid, pessimistic, misanthropic dogmatism, often written by suicidal types who sooner or later kill themselves with alcohol or drugs, or shotguns, Professor Takuda was a remarkably cheerful man."
"Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination, and of the heart."
Explore more quotes by Henry James
"Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints."
"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."
"The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting."
"To take what there is in life and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived, to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that; this, doubtless, is the right way to live."
"I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all."
"If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it."
"It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance... and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process."
bottom of page