Henry Miller
31 quotations
I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.
You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread.
Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.
If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.
All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.
The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.
Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything -- except his own nature.
It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world -- it's the American way of looking at things.
Who hates the Jews more than the Jew?
Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.
Sin, guilt, neurosis --they are one and the same, the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
The real leader has no need to lead -- he is content to point the way.
What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.
The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.
Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.
Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.
Actors die so loud.
Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.
One's destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.
Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.
Remorse is impotence, it will sin again. Only repentance is strong, it can end everything.
What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.
Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation. The other eight are unimportant.
An artist is always alone -- if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.