Henry James Mind Quotations

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.

He valued life and literature equally for the light they threw upon each other; to his mind one implied the other; he was unable to conceive of them apart.

It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.

The main object of the novel is to represent life. . .The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that illusion makes it appear to us for the time that we have lived another life - that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience.

The effect, if not the prime office, of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoyment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental demand, which thus in turn wanders further and further for pasture. This action on the part of the mind practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons of its interest, as only by its ascertaining them can the interest grow more various. This is the very education of our imaginative life.

...The peculiar air of Oxford-the air of liberty to care for the things of the mind assured and secured by machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to sense.

The faculty of attention has utterly vanished from the Anglo-Saxon mind, extinguished at its source by the big bayad?re of journalism, of the newspaper and the picture magazine which keeps screaming, "Look at me." Illustrations, loud simplifications... bill poster advertising ? only these stand a chance.