Quotes from Henry Miller

If you can't give the is-ness of a thing give the not-ness of it! The main thing is to hook up, get the wheels turning, sound off. When your brakes jam, try going in reverse. If often works.

Tell me what it is that man can build, to protect himself, which other men cannot destroy? What are we trying to defend? Only what is old, useless, dead, indefensible. Every defense is a provocation to assault. Why not surrender? Why not give—give all? It's so damned practical, so thoroughly effective and disarming.

When you visit your analyst does he ask you what you read when using the stool? He should, you know. To an analyst it should make a great difference whether you read one kind of literature in the toilet and another elsewhere. It should even make a difference to him whether you read or do not read—in the toilet. Such matters are unfortunately not widely enough discussed. It is assumed that what one does in the toilet is one's own private affair. It is not. The whole universe is concerned.

On one side of the ledger are the books man has written, containing sucha a hodgepodge of wisdom and nonsense, truth and falsehood, that if one lived to be as old as Methuselah one couldn't disentangle the mess; on the other side of the ledger things like toenails, hair, teeth, blood, ovaries, if you will, all incalculable and all written in another kind of ink, in another script, an incomprehensible, undecipherable script.

Klasikleri sindirmiÅŸ olan herkes, düÅŸmand?r insanl??a

To make absolute, unconditional surrender to the woman one loves is to break every bond save the desire not to lose her, which is the most terrible bond of all.

The young Hindu, of course, is optimistic. He has been to America and he has been contaminated by the cheap idealism of the Americans, contaminated by the ubiquitous bathtub, the five-and-ten-cent store bric-a-brac, the bustle, the efficiency, the machinery, the high wages, the free libraries, etc., etc.

Confirmations, corroborations rather than disillusionment. At eighteen I was as much of a philosopher as I ever will be.

When a portrait commences badly it's because you're not describing the woman you have in mind: you are thinking more about those who are going to look at the portrait than about the woman who is sitting for you.

Als je verkiest met de kudde mee te lopen ben je immuun. Als je geaccepteerd en geapprecieerd wilt worden moet je jezelf tot een nulliteit maken, jezelf zo maken dat je niet van de kudde te onderscheiden bent. Je mag wel dromen, mits je droomt wat miljoenen anderen tegelijk dromen.

It's best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it's always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled.... It doesn't exist, America. It's a name you give to an abstract idea.

For me the book is the man and my book is the man I am, the confused man, the negligent man, the recklass man, the lusty, obscene, boisterous, thoughtful, scrupulous, lying, diabolically thruthful man that I am.

I expected so much, so much of the world and it all fell short.

Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it.

To think that he can lie beside that furnace I stoked for him and do nothing but make water!

A good lie reveals more than the truth can ever reveal.

This keeping oneself alive, out of a blind urge to defeat death, is in itself a means of sowing death. Every one who has not fully accepted life, who is not incrementing life, is helping to fill the world with death.

The world is divided into three parts of which two parts are meat balls and spaghetti and the other part a huge syphilitic chancre. (revised, correct quote)

I don't know which affected me more deeply—the story of the lemon groves just opposite us or the sight of Poros itself when suddenly I realized that we were sailing through the streets. If there is one dream which I like above all others it is that of sailing on land.

Animate or inanimate, all bodies under the sun give expression to their vitality. Especially on a fine day in spring!

Aquellos dos hablaban de especie de jerga matemática superior. Nunca entraba en ella nada de carne y hueso: era extraña, fantasmal, espantosamente abstracta.

que sólo quienes, como él, son sensibles a la alquimia del sonido y los sentidos, son capaces de transformar la realidad negativa de la vida en las formas substanciales y significativas del arte. Sólo quienes pueden admitir la luz en sus entrañas pueden expresar lo que hay en el corazón.

Perhaps it was the fact of having no father that pushed him along the road toward the discovery of the self, which is the final process of identification with the world and the realization consequently of the uselessness of ties.

It's beautiful to have a smoking jacket, a good cigar and a wife who plays the piano. So relaxing. So lenitive. Between the acts you go out for a smoke and a breath of fresh air.