Quotes from Henry Miller

No matter how attached I became to a 'cunt', I was always more interested in the person who owned it. A cunt doesn't live a separate, independent existence. Nothing does. Everything is interrelated.

To make the world laugh is one thing; to make it happy is quite another. Nobody has even succeeded in doing it.

There were lots of words which had fallen out of my vocabulary, living abroad so long.

There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.

And inevitably there always crept into our discussions the figure of Whitman, that one lone figure which America has produced in the course of her brief life. In Whitman the whole American scene comes to life, her past and her future, her birth and her death. Whatever there is of value in America Whitman has expressed, and there is nothing more to be said.

The world is always dying and always coming back to life. Tide and pulse, and with the turn of the tide a touch of mystery.

Mientras falte esa chispa de pasión, la actuación carecerá de significado humano.

That's the first thing that strikes an American woman about Europe – that it's unsanitary. Impossible for them to conceive of a paradise without modern plumbing. If they find a bedbug they want to write a letter immediately to the chamber of commerce.

the angel in man-- has also been my own life-long obsession. In a sense I believe it has always been the problem of the creative being... obsessed... with the idea of re-creating the world in order, as I see it, to re-establish man's innocence.

They were painfully clean. But inwardly they stank. Never once did they opened the door that leads to the soul; never once did they dream of taking a blind leap into the dark.

dijo Emerson, . Si es así, mi vida, no es más que un gran intestino. No sólo pienso en la comida todo el día, sino que, además, sueño con ella por la noche.

They died comfortably in their little bed of understanding, to become useful citizens of the world. I pitied them, and in short order I deserted them one by one, without the slightest regret.

Dormir se puede casi en cualquier parte, pero hay que tener un sitio para trabajar. Hasta una novela mala requiere una silla para sentarse y un poquito de intimidad.

Las personas son como los piojos: se te meten bajo la piel y se entierran en ella.

En la juventud éramos íntegros y el terror y el dolor del mundo nos penetraron por completo. No había una clara separación entre la alegría y la pena: se fundían en una sola cosa, al igual que nuestras horas de lucidez se funden con el sueño y el dormir. Nos levantamos por la mañana siendo unos seres, y por la noche, completamente ahogados, bajamos a un mar empuñando las estrellas y la fiebre del día.

Nothing better between five and seven than to be pushed around in that throng, to follow a leg or a beautiful bust, to move along with the tide and everything whirling in your brain. A weird sort of contentment in those days. No appointments, no invitations for dinner, no program, no dough. The golden period, when I had not a single friend.

I thought I had found a living volcano, a female Vesuvius. I never thought of a human ship going down in an ocean of despair, in a Sargasso of impotence.

I know we were conjugating the verb love like two maniacs trying to fuck through an iron gate.

The kangaroo has a double penis - one for week days and one for holidays.

Real wisdom is being stored away in the subcellars by the misers of learning.

Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some extrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders.

If you do not know where you are going, any road will take you there."*

Amo todo lo que fluye, todo lo que contiene el tiempo y el porvenir, que nos devuelve al comienzo donde nunca hay fin.

Often she would lock herself in her room and sitting before the mirror, apply the makeup of John Barrymore, Barrymore of The Sea Beast or of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Seeing these gruesome images in the mirror she would being to rave. Who am I? she would say. What am I?