Quotes by Miller, Henry

"Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race."

Miller, Henry on books - classics
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"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."

Miller, Henry on books - reading   

"Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs."

Miller, Henry on books - reading   

"A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there -- that of the pulse, the heart beat."

Miller, Henry on books - reading
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"All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet -- if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content."

Miller, Henry on books - reading   

"The life of a creator is not the only life nor perhaps the most interesting which a man leads. There is a time for play and a time for work, a time for creation and a time for lying fallow. And there is a time, glorious too in its own way, when one scarcely exists, when one is a complete void. I mean -- when boredom seems the very stuff of life."

Miller, Henry on bores and boredom   

"Every genuine boy is a rebel and an anarch. If he were allowed to develop according to his own instincts, his own inclinations, society would undergo such a radical transformation as to make the adult revolutionary cower and cringe."

Miller, Henry on boys   

"Broadway, such as I see it now and have seen it for twenty-five years, is a ramp that was conceived by St. Thomas Aquinas while he was yet in the womb. It was meant originally to be used only by snakes and lizards, by the horned toad and the red heron, but when the great Spanish Armada was sunk the human kind wriggled out of the ketch and slopped over, creating by a sort of foul, ignominious squirm and wiggle the cunt-like cleft that runs from the Battery south to the golf links north through the dead and wormy center of Manhattan Island."

Miller, Henry on broadway   

"Instead of asking -- How much damage will the work in question bring about? why not ask -- How much good? How much joy?"

Miller, Henry on censorship
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"Chaos is the score upon which reality is written."

Miller, Henry on chaos
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"Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing. Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn't the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us."

Miller, Henry on taboos
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"The American white man (not to speak of the Indian, the Negro, the Mexican) hasn't a ghost of a chance. If he has any talent he's doomed to have it crushed one way or another. The American way is to seduce a man by bribery and make a prostitute of him. Or else to ignore him, starve him into submission and make a hack of him."

Miller, Henry on talent
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"Man torturing man is a fiend beyond description. You turn a corner in the dark and there he is. You congeal into a bundle of inanimate fear. You become the very soul of anesthesia. But there is no escaping him. It is your turn now..."

Miller, Henry on torture   

"If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things."

Miller, Henry on travel   

"When one is trying to do something beyond his known powers it is useless to seek the approval of friends. Friends are at their best in moments of defeat."

Miller, Henry on trying   

"Nine-tenths of our sickness can be prevented by right thinking plus right hygiene -- nine-tenths of it!"

Miller, Henry on vision   

"There are lone figures armed only with ideas, sometimes with just one idea, who blast away whole epochs in which we are enwrapped like mummies. Some are powerful enough to resurrect the dead. Some steal on us unawares and put a spell over us which it takes centuries to throw off. Some put a curse on us, for our stupidity and inertia, and then it seems as if God himself were unable to lift it."

Miller, Henry on vision   

"The word which gives the key to the national vice is waste. And people who are wasteful are not wise, neither can they remain young and vigorous. In order to transmute energy to higher and more subtle levels one must first conserve it."

Miller, Henry on waste   

"After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I'd say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you're walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you're not vitally interested in."

Miller, Henry on writers and writing   

"A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in."

Miller, Henry on writers and writing   

"The American ideal is youth --handsome, empty youth."

Miller, Henry on youth   

"The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidaires, her soundproof walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph."

Miller, Henry on life   

"The word civilization to my mind is coupled with death. When I use the word, I see civilization as a crippling, thwarting thing, a stultifying thing. For me it was always so. I don't believe in the golden ages, you see... civilization is the arteriosclerosis of culture."

Miller, Henry on civilization   

"Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, peccaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc."

Miller, Henry on civilization
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"Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not yet understood."

Miller, Henry on confusion
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"We do not talk -- we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests."

Miller, Henry on conversation
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"In the beginning was the Word. Man acts it out. He is the act, not the actor."

Miller, Henry on creation   

"All the lies and evasions by which man has nourished himself -- civilization, in a word is the fruits of the creative artist. It is the creative nature of man which has refused to let him lapse back into that unconscious unity with life which characterizes the animal world from which he made his escape."

Miller, Henry on creativity   

"There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry."

Miller, Henry on creativity   

"The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you."

Miller, Henry on crime and criminals   

"We have been educated to such a fine -- or dull -- point that we are incapable of enjoying something new, something different, until we are first told what it's all about. We don't trust our five senses; we rely on our critics and educators, all of whom are failures in the realm of creation. In short, the blind lead the blind. It's the democratic way."

Miller, Henry on criticism   

"Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire."

Miller, Henry on criticism
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"Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artists."

Miller, Henry on culture   

"The world is the mirror of myself dying."

Miller, Henry on death   

"In the attempt to defeat death man has been inevitably obliged to defeat life, for the two are inextricably related. Life moves on to death, and to deny one is to deny the other."

Miller, Henry on death
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"All history is the record of man's signal failure to thwart his destiny-the record, in other words, of the few men of destiny who, through the recognition of their symbolic rôle, made history."

Miller, Henry on   

"History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time."

Miller, Henry on   

"True strength lies in submission which permits one to dedicate his life, through devotion, to something beyond himself."

Miller, Henry on submission
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