Quotes from Henry Miller

It's hard to know, when you're in such a jam, which is worse—not having a place to sleep or not having a place to work. 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.

What was most annoying was that at first blush people usually took me to be good, to be kind, generous, loyal, faithful. Perhaps I did possess these virtues but if so it was because I was indiferent: I could afford to be good, kind, generous, loyal, and so forth, since I was free of envy. Envy was the one thing I was never a victim of. I have never envied anybody or anything. On the contrary, I have only felt pity for everybody and everything.

When you get an erection you think you're passionate.

The life which, if i were still a man with pride, honor, ambition and so forth, would seem like the bottom rung of degredation. It's a negative reality, just like death -- a sort of heaven without the pain and terror of dying.

No greater humiliation, it seems to me, was meted out to any man than Montezuma; no race was ever more ruthlessly wiped out that the American Indian; no land was ever raped in a bloody and foul way than California was by the gold diggers. I blush to think of our origins—our hands are steeped in blood and crime.

There's only one good aspect to it, says Joe. You may get his job. And if you have any luck, maybe you'll fall down the elevator shaft and break your neck too. We'll buy you a nice wreath, I promise you that.

Yeah, I picked up a book and I read. You can get something out of a book, even a bad book ... but a cunt, it's just sheer loss of time. . . .

Life, as we all know, is conflict, and man, being part of life, is himself an expression of conflict. If he recognizes the fact and accepts it, he is apt, despite the conflict, to know peace and to enjoy it. But to arrive at this end, which is only a beginning (for we haven't begun to live yet!), a man has got to learn the doctrine of acceptance, that is, of unconditional surrender, which is love.

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.

Se houvesse um homem que ousase dizer tudo quanto pensa deste mundo, não lhe restaria um palmo quadrado de terra onde ficar.

If ever there was a guilty age, this is it. Guilt and hysteria. And at the bottom of it all, like an evil dragon, lies Fear.

Naktis kybojo virš žem?s, aštri kaip durklas, girta kaip pamiš?l?.

L'homme a ce choix : laisser entrer la lumière ou garder les volets fermés.

Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The world was intact.

No tengo dinero, ni recursos ni esperanzas. Soy el hombre más feliz del mundo.

Everybody is giving birth to something - everybody but the lesbian in the upper tier. Her head is uptilted, her throat wide open; she is all alert and tingling with the shower of sparks that burst from the radium symphony. Jupiter is piercing her ears.

The trouble with Irene is that she has a valise instead of a cunt. She wants fat letters to shove in her valise.

The man who was talking had ceased to be of human size or proportions but had become a Colossus whose silhouette swooned backwards and forwards with the deep droning rhythm of his drug-laden phrases. He went on and on and on, unhurried, unruffled, inexhaustible, inextinguishable, a voice that had taken form and shape and substance, a figure that had outgrown its human frame, a silhouette whose reverberations rumbled in the depths of the distant mountain sides.

In every room there is a mirror before which he stands attentively and chews his rage, and from the constant chewing, from the grumbling and mumbling and the muttering and cursing his jaws have gotten unhinged and they sag badly and, when he rubs his beard, pieces of his jaw crumble away and he's so disgusted with himself that he stamps on his own jaw, grinds it to bits with his big heels.

In her tight-fitting Persian dress, with turban to match, she looked ravishing.

When I look down into this fucked out cunt of a whore I feel the whole world beneath me, a world tottering and crumbling, a world used up and polished like a leper's skull.

My one thought is to get out of New York, to experience something genuinely American.

The poet speaks only to the poet. Spirit answereth spirit. The rest is hogwash.

Believe me; there's nothing clean, nothing healthy, nothing promising about this age of wonders - except the telling.