"Try everything, do everything, render everything - be an artist, be distinguished to the last ... " - Henry James

I have only to let myself go! So I have said to myself all my life - so I said to myself in the far-off days of my fermenting and passionate youth. Yet I have never fully done it. 

The sense of it - of the need of it - rolls over me at times with commanding force: it seems the formula of my salvation, of what remains to me of a future. I am in full possession of accumulated resources - I have only to use them, to insist, to persist, to do something more - to do much more than I have done. 

The way to do it - to affirm one's self 'sur la fin' - is to strike as many notes, deep, full, and rapid, as one can. All life is - at my age, with all one's artistic soul the record of it - in one's pocket, as it were. 

Go on, my boy, and strike hard ... Try everything, do everything, render everything - be an artist, be distinguished to the last. 

– Henry James, The Collected Notebooks of Henry James