90 quotes
I had to learn, as I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must write and write and write.
Henry Miller on Writing (1964)
No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.
The Wisdom of the Heart (1941)
Sleep, Napoleon! It was not your ideas they wanted, it was your corpse.
Tropic of Cancer (1934)
If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1957)
The history of the world is the history of a privileged few.
Sunday after the War (1944)
It was here in Big Sur that I first learned to say 'amen.'
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1957)
And then he describes... how he bent down and kissed her breasts, and how, after he had kissed them fervidly, he stuffed them back into her corsage, or whatever it is they call these things.
Tropic of Cancer (1934)
Things happen or they don't happen, that's all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony because we've lost the habit of falling asleep.
Henry Miller on Writing (1964)
We're creators by permission, by grace as it were. No one creates alone, of and by himself. An artist is an instrument that registers something already existent, something which belongs to the whole world, and which, if he is an artist, he is compelled to give back to the world.
The Rosy Crucifixion I: Sexus (1949)
The waking mind...is the least serviceable in the arts.
Interview in London (1961)
One becomes aware in France, after having lived in America, that sex pervades the air. It's there all around you, like a fluid.
Interview in London (1961)
She was to me, and still is, the greatest person I have known — one who can truly be called a "devoted" soul. I owe her everything.
Letters of Henry Miller and Wallace Fowlie (1975)
[T]he aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
The Wisdom of the Heart (1941)
Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race
Tropic of Cancer (1934)
[T]he blind lead the blind, it's the democratic way.
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945)
I feel that America is essentially against the artist, that the enemy of America is the artist, because he stands for individuality and creativeness, and that's un-American somehow.
Interview in London (1961)
Even before the music begins there is that bored look on people's faces. A polite form of self-imposed torture, the concert.
Tropic of Cancer (1934)
Every genuine boy is a rebel and an anarch. If he were allowed to develop according to his own instincts, his own inclinations, society would undergo such a radical transformation as to make the adult revolutionary cower and cringe.
As far as Bach is concerned, I never came close to liking him...My favourite composer is Scriabin...[and] his Fifth sonata, in my mind, the greatest piece of music ever written.
Reflections (1981)
One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.
Interview in London (1961)