Henry Miller Quotes

Instead of asking 'How much damage will the work in question bring about?' why not ask 'How much good? How much joy?'

I have found God, but he is insufficient.

Serenity is when you get above all this, when it doesn't matter what they think, say or want, but when you do as you are, and see God and Devil as one.

Even if it doesn't work, there is something healthy and invigorating about direct action

The most difficult thing to adjust to, apparently, is peace and contentment.

There's nothing wrong with the world. What's wrong is our way of looking at it.

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.

The cancer of time is eating us away

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes.

When you can't create you can work

In every man's heart there is anchored a little schooner.

The only peace, the only security, is in fulfillment.

We should not stop to reflect, compare, analyze, possess, but flow on and through, endlessly, like music.

In the beginning was the Word. Man acts it out. He is the act, not the actor.

It's the pleasure of picking up the brush and seeing what happens.

We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets - we remember only.

You have to write a million words before you find your voice as a writer.

Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery.

Even the idiot may have a message for us

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.

There's something perverse about women...they're all masochists at heart.

Why change the world? Change worlds!

The concert is a polite form of self induced torture.

Certainly paradise, whatever, wherever it be, contains flaws. (Paradisical flaws, if you like.) If it did not, it would be incapable of drawing the hearts of men or angels.

The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you.

Hitler is no worse, nay better, in my opinion, than the other lugs. He makes the German mistake of being tactless, that's all.

History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time.

I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen.

For the artist to attach himself to his work, or identify himself with it, is suicidal.

What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.

I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

How different the new order would be if we could consult the veteran instead of the politician.

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.

Plots and character don't make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip.

The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.

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.

The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them.

The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal.

I had learned to harness ignorance with presumption. I was ready to become an unacknowledged watercolorist.

Who hates the Jews more than the Jew?

I believe in saying the truth, coming out with it cold, shocking if necessary, not disguising it.

Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.

Who wants to be a hundred? What's the point of it? A short life and a merry one is far better than a long one sustained by fear, caution, and perpetual medical surveillance.

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.

No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in.

Leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.

We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation.

There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books