Quotes from Henry Miller

Ideas are living creatures, active and activating, like flowers.

The whole world seemed to unroll like a pornographic film whose tragic theme is impotence.

this book has begun to grow inside me. I am carrying it around with me everywhere. I walk through the streets big with child and the cops escort me across the street. Women get up to offer me their seats. Nobody pushes me rudely any more. I am pregnant. I waddle awkwardly, my big stomach pressed against the weight of the world.

Nada podrá contrarrestar ese virus que está envenenando el mundo entero. América es la encarnación de la fatalidad. Va a arrastrar al mundo entero hasta el abismo sin fondo.

Why do lovely faces haunt us so? Do extraordinary flowers have evil roots?

El arte consiste en llegar hasta la últimas consecuencias. Si comienzas con tambores, tienes que acabar con dinamita o TNT.

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum.

Man will change nothing of his final destiny, which is to return sooner or later to the unconscious and the formless.

Os veo sentados ahí juntos, y sé que os separa un abismo. Vuestra cercanía es la de los planetas. Yo soy el vacío entre vosotros. Si me retiro, no tendréis vacío en que flotar.

Te quiero…te adoro –dice–. Iré adonde digas: Estambul, Singapur, Honolulú. Pero ahora tengo que irme…se está haciendo tarde.

No man ever puts down what he intended to say... words... are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event which is untransmissible.

I had just made the realization that life is indestructible and that there is no such thing as time, only the present.

Sometimes I think I'm an artist. Once in a great while I even think I may be a visionary, but never a prophet, a seer.

I detest all books which run chronologically, which commence at the cradle and end with the grave. Even life doesn't run that way, much as people think it does. Life only commences at the hour of spiritual birth - which may be at eighteen or at forty-seven. And death is never the goal - but life! more life!

Onward and away from the self, until the lat substantial particle of the soul be stretched to infinity. In her panic-stricken flight she seemed to bear the whole world in her womb. We were being driven out of the confines of the universe towards a nebula which no instrument could visualize. We were being rushed to a pause so still, so prolonged, that death by comparison seems a mad witches' revel.

Better a good venereal disease than a moribund peace and quiet.

This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art…

I was polluting the bed with dreams.

In the four hundred years since the last devouring soul appeared; the last man to know the meaning of ecstasy, there has been a constant and steady decline of man in art, in thought, in action. The world is pooped out: there isn't a dry fart left.

Taboos, though unadmitted, are potent. What is it that people fear? What they don't understand. The civilized man is not a whit different from the savage in this respect. 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.

But music is very important. Music is a tonic for the pineal gland. Music isn't Bach or Beethoven; music is the can opener of the soul. It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there's a roof to your being.

The disorientation and reorientation which comes with the initiation into any mystery is the most wonderful experience which is possible to have.

It's terrible to be civilized, because when you come to the end of the world you have nothing to support the terror of loneliness.

slaying everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their vitals.