Top 100 Quotes About Henry Miller
#1. I never liked the language of Henry Miller. I don't think pornography has added to our sensual life.
Anais Nin
#2. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing. - HENRY MILLER
Tatiana De Rosnay
#3. And the books you write. They're not you. They're not me sitting here, this Henry Miller. They belong to someone else. It's terrible. You can never rest.
Henry Miller
#4. One of the best things Henry Miller ever said was that art goes all out. It's all out. It goes full length ... A big book is an all-out book in which you limit your life to things that pertain directly to the book.
Nelson Algren
#5. I've always been inspired by Genet, Henry Miller and Hubert Selby, Jr., who taught me that you've got to tell a bigger truth in whatever you're doing, but the truth is not popular.
Lydia Lunch
#6. Two of my favourite books are Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer' and 'Tropic of Capricorn.'
Lydia Lunch
#7. I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.
Leslie Fiedler
#8. Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.
Leslie Fiedler
#9. In this way, writers are indeed, as Henry Miller suggested, traitors to the human race. We may turn a light on inequity, injustice, and oppression from time to time, but we regularly kill what we love in insidious fashion.
Anthony Bourdain
#10. If you're great, you can stay that way and people will believe in you, swear by you, turn the world upside down for you. But, if you're only partly great, or just a nobody, then what happens to you is lost. (Read by Henry Miller)
Henry Miller
#11. Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Graham Greene - they influenced my life to a profound extent.
Paul Theroux
#12. Henry Miller is a famous writer whose work has fallen out of fashion, but I strongly recommend that readers who don't know his work pick up a book and experience this writer's zealous, crazy, inventive, funny, sexy, often delirious prose.
Siri Hustvedt
#13. If Henry Miller often sounded like a village idiot, it is because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.
Gore Vidal
#14. I'm tempted to tell you that you think too much, but I'm not really one to talk,' Jacob said. 'Henry Miller wrote something about fear making you fearless. It's a very powerful emotion. Use it to get what you want. I mean if it's going to rule our life, it might as well rule you to freedom, right?
Tiffanie DeBartolo
#15. I was the least impressed with, a woman who thought Henry Miller was a police sitcom from the seventies.
Tiffanie DeBartolo
#16. Since Henry Miller's Tropic books, of course, it has become difficult to talk sensibly about girls' c*nts.
Martin Amis
#17. I'd love to talk to Janeane Garafalo or Randi Rhodes or Stephanie Miller from Air America. I'm an Air American junkie; I listen to them every day.
Henry Rollins
#18. Before I shall have become a man again I shall probably exist as a park, a sort of natural park in which people come to rest, to while away the time. What they say or do will be of little matter, for they will bring only their fatigue, their boredom, their hopelessness.
Henry Miller
#19. For in Mexico, ladies and gentlemen, it's always high noon and what glows is fuchsia and what's dead is dead and no feather-dusters.
Henry Miller
#20. In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other.
Henry Miller
#21. There are times when I myself no longer know whether I said and did the things I report or whether I dreamed them up. Anyway, I always dream true. If I lie a bit now and then it is mainly in the interest of truth.
Henry Miller
#22. The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.
Henry Miller
#23. Surrealism is merely the reflection of the death process. It is one of the manifestations of a life becoming extinct, a virus which quickens the inevitable end.
Henry Miller
#24. You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread.
Henry Miller
#25. It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.
Henry Miller
#26. Her fluency was marvelous. She would say things at random, intricate, flamelike, or slide off into a parenthetical limbo peppered with fireworks
admirable linguistic feats which a practiced writer might struggle for hours to achieve.
Henry Miller
#27. What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.
Henry Miller
#28. A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.
Henry Miller
#29. In the beginning was the Word. Man acts it out. He is the act, not the actor.
Henry Miller
#30. My understanding of the meaning of a book is that the book itself disappears from sight, that it is chewed alive, digested and incorporated into the system as flesh and blood which in turn creates new spirit and reshapes the world.
Henry Miller
#31. I used to think a bird couldn't fly if its wings got wet.
Henry Miller
#32. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation.
Henry Miller
#33. The only difference between the Adamic man and the man of today is that the one was born to Paradise and the other has to create it.
Henry Miller
#34. One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.
Henry Miller
#35. I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.
Henry Miller
#36. Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of help except by being kind, generous, and patient.
Henry Miller
#37. All my Calvaries were rosy crucifixions, pseudo-tragedies to keep the fires of hell burning brightly for the real sinners who are in danger of being forgotten.
Henry Miller
#38. When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently.
Henry Miller
#39. The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.
Henry Miller
#40. The smile was so painfully swift and fleeting that it was like the flash of a knife.
Henry Miller
#41. I saw through to the last sign and symbol, but I could not read her face. I could see only the eyes shining through, huge, fleshy-like luminous beasts, as though I were swimming behind them in the electric effluvia of her incandescent vision.
Henry Miller
#42. You start with the sublime and end up in an alley jerking away for dear life.
Henry Miller
#43. Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music - the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
Henry Miller
#44. It was you, you who brought me the pardon. Pee on me, won't you. It would be like benediction. O, what a sleepwalker I have been!
Henry Miller
#45. Everything remains unsettled forever, depend on it
Henry Miller
#46. Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.
Henry Miller
#47. Over there you think of nothing but becoming President of the United States some day. Potentially every man is Presidential timber. Here it's different. Here every man is potentially a zero. If you become something or somebody it is an accident, a miracle.
Henry Miller
#48. I tried to look earnest, but I only succeeded in looking pathetic.
Henry Miller
#49. Part of the act of creating is in discovering your own kind. They are everywhere. But don't look for them in the wrong places.
Henry Miller
#51. I had learned to harness ignorance with presumption. I was ready to become an unacknowledged watercolorist.
Henry Miller
#52. Always a good dodge to simplify your problem by removing it.
Henry Miller
#53. And again that big, bushy thing of hers worked its bloom and magic. It began to have an independent existence for me too. There was Germaine and there was that rose bush of hers.. I liked them separately and I liked them together.
Henry Miller
#54. People used to envy me my inspiration. I hate inspiration. It takes you over completely. I could never wait until it passed and I got rid of it.
Henry Miller
#55. You are always laughing at the wrong moment; you are considered cruel and heartless when in reality you are only tough and durable. But if you would laugh when others laugh and weep when they weep then you must be prepared to die as they die and live as they live.
Henry Miller
#56. A great work of art, if it accomplishes anything, serves to remind us, or let us say to set us dreaming, of all that is fluid and intangible.
Henry Miller
#57. Every so often I revolt, even against what I believe in with all my heart. I have to attack everything, myself included. Why? To simplify things.
Henry Miller
#58. I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots.
Henry Miller
#59. Topographically the country is magnificent - and terrifying. Why terrifying? Because nowhere else in the world is the divorce between man and nature so complete. Nowhere have I encountered such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as here in America. Here boredom reaches its peak.
Henry Miller
#60. It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.
Henry Miller
#61. To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were only capable of staying awake long enough to let the idea soak in.
Henry Miller
#62. There's nothing wrong with the world. What's wrong is our way of looking at it.
Henry Miller
#63. Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.
Henry Miller
#64. The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
Henry Miller
#65. I felt free and chained at the same time - like one feels just before election, when all the crooks have been nominated and you are beseeched to vote for the right man.
Henry Miller
#66. For her were meant those terrible words of Louis-Philippe, and a night comes when all is over, when so many jaws have closed upon us that we no longer have the strength to stand, and our meat hangs upon our bodies, as though it had been masticated by every mouth.
Henry Miller
#68. If there is to be any peace it will come through being, not having.
Henry Miller
#69. The word which gives the key to the national vice is waste. And people who are wasteful are not wise, neither can they remain young and vigorous. In order to transmute energy to higher and more subtle levels one must first conserve it.
Henry Miller
#70. To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts.
Henry Miller
#71. At the opera, the music makes no sense; here in the street it has just the right demented touch to give it poignancy.
Henry Miller
#72. My one thought is to get out of New York, to experience something genuinely American.
Henry Miller
#73. Suffering is futile, my intelligence told me over and over, but I went on suffering voluntarily.
Henry Miller
#74. What I really hoped for, no doubt, was to come upon one of those lives which begin nowhere, which lead us through marshes and salt flats, trickling away, seemingly without plan, purpose or goal, and suddenly emerge, gushing like geysers, and never cease gushing, even in death.
Henry Miller
#75. Man torturing man is a fiend beyond description. You turn a corner in the dark and there he is. You congeal into a bundle of inanimate fear. You become the very soul of anesthesia. But there is no escaping him. It is your turn now ...
Henry Miller
#76. I demanded a realm in which I should be both master and slave at the same time: The world of art is the only such realm.
Henry Miller
#77. 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.
Henry Miller
#78. The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne's impulse to go straightway to see her.
Henry James
#79. The enchanting, and sometimes terrifying, thing is that the world can be so many things to so many different souls. That it can be, and is, all these things at once and the same time.
Henry Miller
#80. The Englishman, be it noted, seldom resorts to violence; when he is sufficiently goaded he simply opens up, like the oyster, and devours his adversary.
Henry Miller
#81. The life which, if i were still a man with pride, honor, ambition and so forth, would seem like the bottom rung of degredation. It's a negative reality, just like death
a sort of heaven without the pain and terror of dying.
Henry Miller
#82. An artist earns the right to call himself a creator only when he admits to himself that he is but an instrument.
Henry Miller
#83. Whoever uses the spirit that is
in him creatively is an artist. To
make living itself an art, that is
the goal.
Henry Miller
#84. The Greek knows how to live with his rags: they don't utterly degrade and befoul him as in other countries I have visited.
Henry Miller
#85. Either you take in believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird.
Henry Miller
#86. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
Henry Miller
#87. Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The world was intact.
Henry Miller
#88. Don't look for miracles. You yourself are the miracle.
Henry Miller
#89. I had to learn, as I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must writer and write and write, even if everybody in the world advises you against it, even if nobody believes in you.
Henry Miller
#90. The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love.
Henry Miller
#91. You can go to the trenches and be blown to bits; nothing will create that spark of passion if there isn't the intervention of a human hand. Somebody has to put his hand into the machine and let it be wrenched off if the cogs are to mesh again.
Henry Miller
#92. If you can't give the is-ness of a thing give the not-ness of it! The main thing is to hook up, get the wheels turning, sound off. When your brakes jam, try going in reverse. If often works.
Henry Miller
#93. The world of men and women are making merry in the cemetery grounds. They are having sexual intercourse, God bless them, and I am alone in the Land of Fuck.
Henry Miller
#94. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment.
Henry Miller
#95. There were lots of words which had fallen out of my vocabulary, living abroad so long.
Henry Miller
#96. 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.
Henry Miller
#97. It's beautiful to have a smoking jacket, a good cigar and a wife who plays the piano. So relaxing. So lenitive. Between the acts you go out for a smoke and a breath of fresh air.
Henry Miller
#98. America is no place for an artist: to be an artist is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer, painter or musician. To be a rabbit is better still.
Henry Miller
#100. In vacuum one has no need for new things, nor of excitement, nor of foreign stimuli. One has only to maintain a bare survival, to vegetate, like a fetus in a jar.
Henry Miller
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