Quotes from Henry Miller

It is not difficult to be alone if you are poor and a failure. An artist is always alone – if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

He was the very corpse of learning.

These memories were beautiful, and they stung like nettles.

One can live without friends, as one can live without love, or even without money, that supposed sine qua non. One can live in Paris – I discovered that! – on just grief and anguish. A bitter nourishment – perhaps the best there is for certain people.

I had to learn, as Balzac did, that one must write volumes before signing ones own name.

everybody becomes a healer the moment he forgets about himself.

Looking at a fragment of The Millennium the other day, I pointed out . . . how hallucinatingly real were the oranges.

Kesin olan tek ÅŸey ÅŸudur: öldüÄŸünde ve dirildiÄŸinde topraÄŸa aitsindir ve topraÄŸa dair ne varsa devredilemez bir biçimde senindir. DoÄŸan?n bir cilvesine dönüÅŸürsün, gölgesiz bir varl??a; bir daha asla ölmeyecek, fakat etraf?ndaki bütün olaylar gibi gelip geçeceksin.

Cuanto mayor es la calidad de un hombre, peor le va.

I got to reminiscing about the past. I thought of all the things I might have said and done, which I hadn't sad or done.

The oranges of Bosch's Millennium . . . exhale this dreamlike reality which constantly eludes us and which is the very substance of life.

We do not talk, we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.

This is not the man who ran away from something, but the man who ran towards something. The man destined no longer to seek but to fulfill himself. Not renunciation, but acceptance.

There was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do.

I got to reminiscing about the past. I thought of all the things I might have said and done, which I hadn't said or done.

Reality is here and now, everywhere, gleaming through every reflection that meets the eye.... Everybody is a neurotic, down to the last man and woman. The healer, or the analyst, if you like, is only a super-neurotic.... To be cured we must rise from our graves and throw off the cerements of the dead. Nobody can do it for another--it is a private affair which is best done collectively.

This is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa looked out on from the Peak of Darien, this is the face of the earth as the creator intended it to look.

There is a world here as full and rich, as compelling and instructive, as Thoreau found at Walden.

This is the melting-pot, the seat of a great human experiment. Beautiful words, full of noble, idealistic sentiment. Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous

It's hard to talk to a person when you have nothing in common with him or her, you betray yourself.

at Tiryns I stood in the shadow of the Cyclopean man and felt the blaze of that inner eye which has now become a sickly gland;

Though I am a born American, though I became what is called an expatriate, I look upon the world not as a partisan of this country or that but as an inhabitant of the globe.

J'ai besoin que l'on me promette presque tout, tant j'ai vécu longtemps, trop longtemps dans l'ombre du soleil. Je veux de la lumière et de la chasteté – et un feu solaire dans les tripes. Je veux la déception et la désillusion, pour qu'il me soit donné de compléter le sublime triangle et de ne plus avoir sans cesse à quitter la planète pour voler dans l'espace.

Like the legendary Big Sur: full of violence, horror, incest, broken dreams, despair, loneliness, insanity and frustration of every sort.