“Trollope will remain one of the most trustworthy, though not one of the most eloquent, of the writers who have helped the heart of man to know itself.... A race is fortunate when it has a good deal of the sort of imagination—of imaginative feeling—that had fallen to the share of Anthony Trollope”

Comments: Click to comment

“A towering idol, I have learned [from Balzac] more of the lessons of engaging mystery of fiction than from anyone else.”

Comments: Click to comment

“Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known.”

Comments: Click to comment

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”

Comments: Click to comment

“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.”

Comments: Click to comment

“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”

Comments: Click to comment

“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”

Comments: Click to comment

Comments: Click to comment

“It is no wonder he wins every game. He has never done a thing in his life except play games”

Comments: Click to comment

“It's time to start living the life you've imagined.”

Comments: Click to comment

“The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.”

Comments: Click to comment

“Money is a horrible thing to chase but a wonderful thing to find.”

Comments: Click to comment

“It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.”

Comments: Click to comment

“If you take it at any one spot and moment, reason is one of the most feeble of Nature's forces. It is only in the long run that its effects become perceptible.”

Comments: Click to comment

“James’s repressions and evasions are many, varied and exhausting. Why more people are not seen rushing shrieking from libraries, shredding James novels in their hands, I cannot say. I used to wonder whether enthusiasm for him was based on identification, since his passive, tentative heroes resemble many academics. Perhaps what is intolerable is his enshrinement in a soporific criticism. So much must be overlooked to crown him with laurel.”

— Camille Paglia 1947 CE –
Fearless and insightful status quo critic
from Sexual Personae (1990)

Comments: Click to comment

“Please tell me what you find in Henry James. ... we have his works here, and I read, and I can't find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar and pale. Is there really any sense in it?"”

— Virginia Woolf 1882 – 1941 CE

Comments: Click to comment

“[The Great Gatsby] seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James”

— T. S. Eliot 1888 – 1965 CE

Comments: Click to comment

“[William] refused altogether to follow his brother Henry into fastidious snobbishness.”

— Bertrand Russell 1872 – 1970 CE
“20th century Voltaire”
from History of Western Philosophy

Comments: Click to comment

“The image of James taking a bow to the jeers and catcalls of the audience has become one of the primal scenes of modernism, and James is revered as the Master partly because of his willingness to wager everything—popularity, fortune, happiness, life—on his vision of artistic perfection”

— Adam Kirsch 1976 CE –
from The New Yorker

Comments: Click to comment

“The men and women who—at the height of World War II—raided the secondhand shops for his out-of-print books knew what they were about. For no writer ever raised a braver banner to which all who love freedom might adhere.”

— ​Edward Wagenknecht 1900 – 2004 CE
Professor and literary critic

Comments: Click to comment