W. Somerset Maugham on Henry James

W. Somerset Maugham on Henry James:

I don't think Henry James ever knew how ordinary people behave. His characters have neither bowels nor sexual organs. He wrote a number of stories about men of letters, and it is told that when someone protested that literary men were not like that, he retorted, "So much the worse for them." Presumably, he did not look upon himself as a realist. Though I do not know that it is a fact, I surmise that he regarded Madame Bovary with horror. On one occasion Matisse was showing a lady a picture of his in which he had painted a naked woman, and the lady exclaimed, "But a woman isn't like that": to which he answered, "It isn't a woman, madam, it's a picture." I think, similarly, if someone had ventured to suggest that a story of James's was not like life, he would have replied, "It isn’t life, it's a story."

From W. Somerset Maugham, Points of View (1958).