Issyvoo

…I prefer Henry James’s remark that the first obligation of the writer—which I would also regard as his last obligation—is to be interesting, to be interesting. To be interesting in one beautiful sentence after another. To be interesting; not to change the world.

A love of Henry James […] can be especially perilous for a twenty-first-century novelist. Because James’s own refinements run so close to self-parody, the contemporary Jamesian runs the risk of pastiching a parodist.

James, like most artists, knew what he was doing only some of the time.

James is like—well, I had a bulldog once who used to drag rails around, enormous ones—six-, eight-, twelve-foot rails. He loved to get them in the middle and you’d hear him growling out there, trying to bring the thing home. Once he brought home a chest of drawers—without the drawers in it. Found it on an ash-heap. Well, he’d start to get these things in the garden gate, everything finely balanced, you see, and then crash, he’d come up against the gate posts. He’d get it through finally, but I had that feeling in some of the James novels: that he was trying to get that rail through a gate not wide enough for it.