Henry Miller Literature Quotations

The prisoner is not the one who has commited a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over.

The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.

Moralities, ethics, laws, customs, beliefs, doctrines - these are of trifling import. All that matters is that the miraculous become the norm.

Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.

We live at the edge of the miraculous.

It does me good to write a letter which is not a response to a demand, a gratuitous letter, so to speak, which has accumulated in me like the waters of a reservoir.

Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

When you know what men are capable of you marvel neither at their sublimity nor their baseness. There are no limits in either direction apparently.

The worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfillment instead of an horizon.

I have never been able to look upon America as young and vital but rather as prematurely old, as a fruit which rotted before it had a chance to ripen.

Plots and character don't make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip.

And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?

What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.