Henry Miller

United States
26 Dec 1891 // 7 Jun 1980
Writer

Texts

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I Want to Laugh More (11)

If I am against the condition of the world it is not because I am a moralist, it is because I want to laugh more. I don't say that God is one grand laugh: I say that you've got to laugh hard before y...
Tropic of Capricorn

I Need my Freedom (12)

I am a free man ― and I need my freedom. I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, ...
Tropic of Cancer

Feel the Blood Running (13)

I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well o...
Tropic of Capricorn

What Have We Achieved with Our Inventions? (14)

We clutter the earth with our inventions, never dreaming that possibly they are unnecessary � or disadvantageous. We devise astounding means of communication, but do we communicate with one another? ...
The World of Sex

The World Has Been Dying (15)

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. Th...
Tropic of Cancer

Man Looks for the Miracle (16)

The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to ac...
Tropic of Cancer

The Poet Greatest Desire (17)

Conditioned to ecstasy, the poet is like a gorgeous unknown bird mired in the ashes of thought. If he succeeds in freeing himself, it is to make a sacrificial flight to the sun. His dreams of a regen...
The Time of the Assassins: a Study of Rimbaud

Writing is a Voyage of Discovery (18)

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. ...
Henry Miller on Writing

Strike a Wonderful Passage (19)

If I were reading a book and happened to strike a wonderful passage I would close the book then and there and go for a walk. I hated the thought of coming to the end of a good book. I would tease it ...
Plexus

How to Tell you what I Feel (20)

Ana�s, I don't know how to tell you what I feel. I live in perpetual expectancy. You come and the time slips away in a dream. It is only when you go that I realize completely your presence. And then ...
A Literate Passion: Letters of Ana�s Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays