He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see – that’s my idea of happiness.
You wanted to look at life for yourself – but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional.
I ought to tell you I’m probably your cousin.
Her memory’s your love. You want no other.
It’s never permitted to be surprised at the aberrations of born fools.
When I am wicked I am in high spirits.
The superiority of one man’s opinion over another’s is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
A man who pretends to understand women is bad manners. For him to really to understand them is bad morals.
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.
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.
It’s a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.
There are two kinds of taste, the taste for emotions of surprise and the taste for emotions of recognition.
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.
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.
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.
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.
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.
The women one meets – what are they but books one has already read? You’re a library of the unknown, the uncut. Upon my word I’ve a subscription.