Quotes from Henry Miller

I'm as good as her dog

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. Henry Miller

The odalisques he has studded with malachite and jasper, their flesh veiled with a thousand eyes, perfumed eyes dipped in the sperm of whales.

Wherever a breeze stirs there are breasts as cool as jelly, white pigeons come to flutter and rut in the ice-blue veins of the Himalayas.

To the surgeon his scalpel, to the gravedigger his pick and shovel, to the analyst his dream books, to the fool his dunce cap. As for me, I have a bellyache.

Soyez indulgents quand vous nous comparez À ceux qui furent la perfection de l'ordre. Nous qui quêtons partout l'aventure, Nous ne sommes pas vos ennemis. Nous voulons vous donner de vastes et d'étranges domaines Où le mystère en fleur s'offre à qui veut le cueillir.

The drains are clogged with strangled embryos.

There are people to whom you feel immediately attracted, not because you like them, but because you detest them. You detest them so heartily that your curiosity is aroused; you come back to them again and again to study them, to arouse in yourself a feeling of compassion which is really absent. You do things for them, not because you feel any sympathy for them, but because their suffering is incomprehensible to you.

Give me a few days of peace in your arms

Perhaps you can visualize him saying a thing like that! Myself it's not clear what his idea of me was, or at any rate, it's clear that I was just pure idea, an idea that kept itself alive without food.

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

He was going to escort us to the Temple of Jupiter and the Theseion and other places as soon as we had had our fill of the Acropolis. We never went to these places, of course. We told him to drive into town, find a cool spot and order some ice cream.

After that I can face the world

a lucid french idea that gauges right through your drunkenness and leaves you swimming helplessly in the past, in a fluid dream that makes you wide awake and yet doesn't jar your nerves.

At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of my rope. I was only flirting with disaster.

perpetrated on a helpless world of idiots.

The most ignorant and degenerate of them will be asked to shoulder a gun and fight for a civilization which has brought them nothing but misery and degradation.

Since then, of course, I have discovered what every madman in Paris discovers sooner of later; that there are no ready made infernos for the tormented.

Eres cáncer y delirio», me dijo por teléfono el otro día.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse . . .

I began in absolute chaos and darkness, in a bog or swamp of ideas and emotions and experiences. Even now I do not consider myself a writer, in the ordinary sense of the word. I am a man telling the story of his life, a process which appears more and more inexhaustible as I go on.

with the result that somewhere along the way one discovers that what one has to tell is not nearly so important as the telling itself.

That wild carnival of maggots which he reveled in, that eternal duel of the sexes, that spiderish ferocity which has endeared him to the sodden oafs of the northland, it was that which had brought us together.

From the very beginning almost I was deeply aware that there is no goal. I never hope to embrace the whole, but merely to give in each separate fragment, each work, the feeling of the whole as I go on, because I am digging deeper and deeper into life, digging deeper and deeper into past and future. With the endless burrowing a certitude develops which is greater than faith or belief. I become more and more indifferent to my fate, as writer, and more and more certain of my destiny as man.