Quotes from Henry Miller

Åžeytan'? iyi tan?yorsam, Ä°çgüdülerine güvenme, sezgilerinden uzak dur, der o. Bizim insan kalmam?z? ister - hem de insandan fazla insan. DüÅŸüÅŸe geçmiÅŸsen bunu sürdürmen için itici gücünü kullan?r. Uçurumdan aÅŸa?? itmez seni - yaln?zca kenar?na dek getirir. Ve orada art?k onun elindesindir, ne yapaca?? insaf?na kalm?? demektir.

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.

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.

From the time you wake up until the moment you go to bed it's all a lie, all a sham and a swindle. Everybody knows it, and everybody collaborates in the perpetuation of the hoax. That's why we look so goddamned disgusting to one another.

Build your cities proud and high. Lay your sewers. Span your rivers. Work feverishly. Sleep dreamlessly. Sing madly, like the bulbul. Underneath, below the deepest foundations, there lives another race of men. They are dark, sombre, passionate. They muscle into the bowels of the earth. They wait with a patience which is terrifying. They are the scavengers. They emerge when everything topples into dust.

When man becomes fully conscious of his powers, his role, his destiny, he is an artist and he ceases his struggle with reality.

The universe has dwindled; it is only a block long and there are no stars, no trees, no rivers. The people who live there are dead; they make chairs which other people sit on in their dreams. In the middle of the street is a wheel and in the hub of the wheel a gallows is fixed. People already dead are trying frantically to mount the gallows, bu the wheel is turning too fast

I am so thoroughly healthy and empty. No dreams, no desires. I am like the luscious deceptive fruit which hangs on the Californian trees. One more ray of sun and I will be rotten

There's something obscene in this love of the past which ends in breadlines and dugouts. Something obscene about this spiritual racket which permits an idiot to sprinkle holy water over Big Berthas and dreadnoughts and high explosives. Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.

I shall be the wild park in the midst of the nightmare of perfection, the still, unshakeable dream in the midst of frenzied activity, the random shot on the white billiard table of logic, I shall know neither how to weep nor protest, but I shall be there always in absolute silence to receive and to restore.

Well, fuck a duck.

Esto no es un libro. Es un libelo, una calumnia, una difamación. No es un libro, en el sentido ordinario de la palabra. No, es un insulto prolongado, un escupitajo a la cara del arte, una patada en el culo a Dios, al hombre, al destino, al tiempo, al amor, a la belleza... a lo que os parezca.

Life was a perpetual black fuck about a fixed pole of insomnia.

In my mind I saw my own temples in ruins, before even one brick had been laid upon another.

Our whole theory of education is based on the absurd notion that we must learn to swim on land before tackling the water. It applies to the pursuit of the arts as well as to the pursuit of knowledge.

This is the greatest damn thing about the universe. That we can know so much, recognize so much, dissect, do everything, and we can't grasp it.

When a desperate, hungry spirit appears and makes the guinea pigs squeal it is because he knows where to put the live wire of sex, because he knows that beneath the hard carapace of indifference there is concealed the ugly gash, the wound that never heals.

If you elect to join the herd you are immune. To be accepted and appreciated you must nullify yourself, make yourself indistinguishable from the herd. You may dream, if you dream alike.

The before dinner atmosphere, the blend of patchouli, warm pitchblend, iced electricity, sugared sweat and powdered urine drives one on to a fever of delerious expectancy.

When you can't create, you can work

To wander farther was to wander alone, to rely wholly upon oneself.

There is an ordinary kind of forgetting and a special kind: the latter is due, more than likely to the vice of living in two worlds at once. One of the consequences of this tendency is that you live everything out innumerable times. Worse, whatever you succeed in transmitting to paper seems but an infinitesimal fraction of what you've already written in your head.

It's as though there were two melodies going on simultaneously: one for private exploitation and the other for the public ear. The whole struggle is to squeeze into the public record some tiny essence of the perpetual inner melody.

One can sleep almost anywhere, but one must have a place to work. Even if it's not a masterpiece you're doing. Even a bad novel requires a chair to sit on and a bit of privacy.