Henry Miller (1891 – 1980)
American writer.
Often, when following the trail which meanders over the hills, I pull myself up in an effort to encompass the glory and the grandeur which envelops the whole horizon. Often, when the clouds pile up in the north and the sea is churned with white caps, I say to myself: "This is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa looked out on from the Peak of Darien, this is the face of the earth as the Creator intended it to look."
The history of the world is the history of a privileged few.
Through art then, one finally establishes contact with reality: that is the great discovery. Here all is play and invention; there is no solid foothold from which to launch the projectiles which will pierce the miasma of folly, ignorance and greed. The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order, to know what is the world order in contradistinction to the wishful-thinking orders which we seek to impose on one another. The power which we long to possess, in order to establish the good, the true and the beautiful, would prove to be, if we could have it, but the means of destroying one another. It is fortunate that we are powerless.
I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death.
Vlaminck and Utrillo were very good friends, drinking buddies. One day they attend a funeral. They're walking behind the hearse in a procession, and they're having a great time conversing with one another. They are completely engrossed when suddenly one asks the other, 'Say, don't you smell something funny?' They look up and they're walking behind a garbage truck! They'd lost the hearse in the middle of their enthusiastic conversation.
One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.
Writing is Crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain & sorrow to commemorate an event which is intransmissible.
Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines - these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm.
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.
The artist who becomes thoroughly aware consequently ceases to be one.
To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money, money, money everywhere and still not enough, and then no money or a little money or less money or more money, but money, always money, and if you have money or you don't have money it is the money that counts and money makes money, but what makes money make money?
I am glad to be a maggot in the corpse which is the world.
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 Gnostics thought the planet Earth was a cosmic mistake. I too feel that way — I'm through with this Earth before I've even departed from it.
A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in....
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.
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.
I knew I wouldn't ever trade all this whirling about my head for Russia or heaven or anything on earth.
Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.
Wagner wrote an opera titled Tristan and Yseult and in it there is a theme called Love Death theme. It is so sensual, so sexual that he was criticized for having introduced sex into music. And that was quite a few years before the appearance of Elvis Presley!