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.
People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.
I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth - I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.
I hate American simplicity. I glory in the piling up of complications of every sort. If I could pronounce the name James in any different or more elaborate way I should be in favor of doing it.
It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.
To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.
It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.
Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet.
What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?
Young men of this class never do anything for themselves that they can get other people to do for them, and it is the infatuation, the devotion, the superstition of others that keeps them going. These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are women.
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.
The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?
I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.
If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.
The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
