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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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.
—Henry Miller
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
There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.
—Henry Miller
I see America spreading disaster. I see America as a black curse upon the world. I see a long night settling in and that mushroom which has poisoned the world withering at the roots.
—Henry Miller
Topics: America
Nine-tenths of our sickness can be prevented by right thinking plus right hygiene—nine-tenths of it.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Health, Meditation
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 caricature. Our world is a world of things. What we dread most, in the face of the impending debacle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gewgaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts that have made us so uncomfortable. We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky.
—Henry Miller
In the beginning was the Word. Man acts it out. He is the act, not the actor.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Creation
Hope is a bad thing. It means that you are not what you want to be. It means that part of you is dead, if not all of you. It means that you entertain illusions. It’s a sort of spiritual clap, I should say.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Hope
The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough is love.
—Henry Miller
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
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Letters
The world itself is pregnant with failure, is the perfect manifestation of imperfection, of the consciousness of failure.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Failure
Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Arts, Artists, Art
I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Age
The loss of sex polarity is part and parcel of the larger disintegration, the reflex of the soul’s death, and coincident with the disappearance of great men, great deeds, great causes, great wars, etc.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Men & Women
The world is the mirror of myself dying.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Death
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Waste, Excess
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
In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Difficulty
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Children
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
The stabbing horror of life is not contained in calamities and disasters, because these things wake one up and one gets very familiar and intimate with them and finally they become tame again. No, it is more like being in a hotel room in Hoboken let us say, and just enough money in one’s pocket for another meal.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Tragedy, Disasters
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Civilization
We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets—we remember only.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Mind, The Mind
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
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
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Travel, Tourism, Attitude
All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous, unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Courage, Growth
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: City Life, Cities
Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything—except his own nature.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Human Nature, Humanity
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Crime, Criminals
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: Discovery, Acceptance
Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Psychiatry
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
Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Man, Mankind, Body
No one asks you to throw Mozart out of the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Lao Tzu and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Innovation
One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Lies, Deception/Lying
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
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
Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to offer the world besides the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?
—Henry Miller
Topics: America
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