17 quotes
Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of any help except by being kind, generous, and patient.
Henry Miller on Writing (1964)
The frantic desire to live, to live at any cost, is not a result of the life rhythm in us, but of the death rhythm.
Henry Miller on Writing (1964)
I am against revolutions because they always involve a return to the status quo.
Henry Miller on Writing (1964)
To be generous is to say Yes before the man even opens his mouth.
Henry Miller on Writing (1964)
I am glad to be a maggot in the corpse which is the world.
Henry Miller on Writing (1964)
Everything remains unsettled forever, depend on it.
Henry Miller on Writing (1964)
The whole damned universe has to be taken apart, brick by brick, and reconstructed.
Henry Miller on Writing (1964)
The artist who becomes thoroughly aware consequently ceases to be one.
Henry Miller on Writing (1964)
Perhaps the artist is nothing more than the personification of this universal maladjustment, this universal disequilibrium.
Henry Miller on Writing (1964)
The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination.
Henry Miller on Writing (1964)
The battle is endless. It had no beginning, nor will it know an end. We who babble and froth at the mouth have been at it since eternity.
Henry Miller on Writing (1964)
I blush to think of our origins—our hands are steeped in blood and crime. And there is no letup to the slaughter and pillage.
Henry Miller on Writing (1964)
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)
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)
Words, sentences, ideas, no matter how subtle or ingenious, the maddest flights of poetry, the most profound dreams, the most hallucinating visions, are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible.
Henry Miller on Writing (1964)
Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.
Henry Miller on Writing (1964)
The happiest peoples, it is said, are those which have no history. Those who have a history, those who have made history seem only to have emphasized through their accomplishments the eternality of struggle. These disappear too eventually, just as those who made no effort, who were content to merely live and enjoy.
Henry Miller on Writing (1964)