Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Millerwas an American writer. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms, developing a new sort of semi-autobiographical novel that blended character study, social criticism, philosophical reflection, explicit language, sex, surrealist free association and mysticism. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, Tropic of Capricornand The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, all of which are based on his experiences in New York and Paris, and all of which were banned in the United...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAutobiographer
Date of Birth26 December 1891
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet - if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.
Remorse is impotence; it will sin again. Only repentance is strong - it can end everything.
The world isn't kept running because it's a paying proposition. (God doesn't make a cent on the deal.) The world goes on because a few men in every generation believe in it utterly, accept it unquestioningly; they underwrite it with their lives.
We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation.
The moment one is on the side of life; peace and security drop out of consciousness. The only peace, the only security, is in fulfillment.
How different the new order would be if we could consult the veteran instead of the politician.
We must be holy without holiness. We must be whole, complete. That's being holy. Any other kind of holiness is false, a snare, and a delusion.
Destiny is what you are supposed to do in life. Fate is what kicks you in the ass to make you do it.
It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.
You have to write a million words before you find your voice as a writer.
When you can't create you can work
There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry.
Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist. To make living itself an art, that is the goal.
With this book in my hands, reading aloud to my friends, questioning them, explaining to them, I was made clearly to understand that I had no friends, that I was alone in the world. Because in not understanding the meaning of the words, neither I nor my friends, one thing became very clear and that was that there were ways of not understanding and that the difference between the non-understanding of one individual and the non-understanding of another created a world of terra firma even more solid than differences of understanding.