 Life is a predicament which precedes death. |
| In art economy is always beauty. |
| Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there. |
| The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life. |
| The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have. |
| 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. |
| It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition. |
| I adore adverbs; they are the only qualifications I really much respect. |
| An Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue. |
| Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had? |
| The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting. |
| One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. |
| Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself. |
| Money's a horrid thing to follow, but a charming thing to meet. |
| The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman. |
| 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. |
| It's a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe. |
| Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
