Henry Valentine Miller (1891–1980) was an American novelist whose works achieved notoriety for their use of sexually explicit and obscene language. His two most famous novels, Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939,) were prohibited from publication and sale in the United States and Britain for many years.
Born and brought up in Brooklyn, New York City, Miller studied briefly at City College of New York and then held various jobs in New York. He devoted himself to writing in 1924 and, in 1930, moved to Paris, where he lived until 1940. There, he published Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and Black Spring (1936.)
Upon returning to America, Miller completed a yearlong road trip across the United States and published a highly critical account of his impression of the U.S. during a time of chauvinism, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945.) He settled in Big Sur, California.
Many of Miller’s works are autobiographical. They were explicitly sexual, and he had to overcome many denunciations from censors. The American editions of the Tropics were not published until the early 1960s. The books were charged with obscenity and were the subject of 60 court cases. In 1964, the Supreme Court ruled in support of the books’ publication, ending censorship based on obscenity in America.
Miller’s other notable works were The Colossus of Maroussi (1941,) and The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy of novels: Sexus (1949,) Plexus (1953) and Nexus (1960.) The volumes of his correspondence include those with Lawrence Durrell (1963,) to Anaïs Nin (1965,) and with Wallace Fowlie (1975.)
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It isn’t the oceans which cut us off from the world—it’s the American way of looking at things.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Isolation, Solitude
The world is not to be put in order, the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Acceptance, Discovery
The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Fear
There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.
—Henry Miller
We are dancing in the hollow of nothingness. We are one flesh, but separated like stars.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Stars
A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values. Our world may have begun that way, but today it is caricatural. Our world is a world of things…. What we dread most, in the face of the impending d
—Henry Miller
Topics: Technology
It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Democracy
Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Madness
Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Philosophy, Philosophers, Science
There is something healthy and invigorating about direct action.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Courage
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Dying, Death
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Books, Reading, Literature
The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Prison
Fame is an illusive thing—here today, gone tomorrow. The fickle, shallow mob raises its heroes to the pinnacle of approval today and hurls them into oblivion tomorrow at the slightest whim; cheers today, hisses tomorrow; utter forgetfulness in a few months.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Fame
Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Progress
One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Politics
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Literature, Books, Reading
Why are we so full of restraint? Why do we not give in all directions? Is it fear of losing ourselves? Until we do lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Self-Control, Control
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Cities, City Life
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: America
The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Security, Change, Safety
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Criticism, Critics
The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Heroes/Heroism, Action, Heroes, Secrets of Success
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Trying, Effort
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Superstition
The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Dreams
Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Imagination
The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.
—Henry Miller
Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music-the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Passion, Love, How to Live
It’s silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are all brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars, hypocrites, poltroons.
—Henry Miller
Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Discovery
To live without killing is a thought which could electrify the world, if men were only capable of staying awake long enough to let the idea soak in.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Murder
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Creativity
The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Fashion
Everyone has his own reality in which, if one is not too cautious, timid, or frightened, one swims. This is the only reality there is.
—Henry Miller
The world isn’t kept running because it’s a paying proposition. (God doesn’t make a cent on the deal.) The world goes on because a few men in every generation believe in it utterly, accept it unquestioningly; they underwrite it with their lives.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Greatness & Great Things, Greatness
Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Power
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Art, Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
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