Quotes from Henry Miller

I would say that the "masterpiece" was the creative act itself and not a particular work which happened to please a large audience and be accepted as the very body of Christ.

whenever in my life I have gazed too long upon Beauty, particularly the beauty of the female, I have always experienced the sensation of fear. Fear, and a touch of horror too.

The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.

We are, most of us, sleepwalkers, and we die without ever opening our eyes.

Tudo se suporta...a desgraça, humilhação, pobreza, guerra, crime, ennui...em nome da crença de que, de um dia para o outro, algo ocorrerá, um milagre que fará com que a vida se torne tolerável.

For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grâce, it needs to be blown to smithereens.

Everything that belongs to the past seems to have fallen into the sea; I have memories, but the images have lost their vividness, they seem dead and desultory, like time - bitten mummies stuck in a quagmire.

What we thrive on is hatred and violence; if we were a peaceable people we would have peace tomorrow.

I was lonely amidst a world of things lit up by phosphorescent flashes of cruelty. I was delirious with an energy which could not be unleashed except in the service of death and futility.

And while it's all very nice to know that a woman has a mind, literature coming from the cold corpse of a whore is the last thing to be served in bed. Germaine had the right idea: she was ignorant and lusty, she put her heart and soul into her work. She was a whore all the way through—and that was her virtue!

If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.

The other night I took her on—out of pity—and what do you think the crazy bitch had done to herself? She had shaved it clean… not a speck of hair on it. Did you ever have a woman who shaved her twat? It's repulsive, ain't it? And it's funny, too. Sort of mad like. It doesn't look like a twat any more: it's like a dead clam or something.

Y, por lo general, las cosas salían mal sólo cuando te preocupabas demasiado.

He wakes up cursing himself, or cursing the job, or cursing life.

How speak about an art which no one recognizes as an art? I know that a great deal has already been written about the art of the cinema. One can read about it most every day in the newspapers & the magazines. But it is not the art of the cinema which you will find discussed therein--it is rather dire, botched embryo as it now stands revealed before our eyes, the still-birth which was mangled in the womb by the obstetricians of art.

He wakes up utterly bored and discomfited, chagrined to think that he did not die overnight.

There are no facts--there is only the fact that man, every man everywhere in the world is on his way to ordination. Some men take the long route and some men take the short route. Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of help except by being kind, generous, and patient.

For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens.

There are authors who intigue me because of all I have heard and read about them, because their lives interest me, yet I cannot read their works. Stendhal is one, and the author of Tristram Shandy another. But perhaps the superb example in this respect is the Marquis de Sade.

It was a crushing defeat, but it put iron in my backbone and sulphur in my blood. I knew at least what it was to fail. I knew what it was to attempt something big.

Devia ter sido um palhaço. Isso ter-me-ia proporcionado o mais vasto campo de expressão. Mas subestimava a profissão. Se me tivesse tornado palhaço, ou até actor de vaudeville, teria sido famoso. As pessoas não me teriam compreendido, mas teriam compreendido que eu não era para ser compreendido. Isso pelo menos teria sido um alívio.

The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.

El caos es la partitura en la que está escrita la realidad.

When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently.