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.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Henry Miller
Like ships, men flounder time and time again.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Resolve, Endurance, Perseverance
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
One of the reasons why so few of us ever act, instead of react, is because we are continually stifling our deepest impulses.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Instincts, Getting Going, Inaction, Procrastination
Remorse is impotence, it will sin again. Only repentance is strong, it can end everything.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Repentance, Forgiveness
The real enemy can always be met and conquered, or won over. Real antagonism is based on love, a love which has not recognized itself.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Enemies, Enemy
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
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
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: How to Live, Passion, Love
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
Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Books
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God. This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, and 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 of God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty
—Henry Miller
Topics: Happiness, Authors & Writing
Any genuine philosophy leads to action and from action back again to wonder, to the enduring fact of mystery.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Philosophy, Science, Philosophers
True strength lies in submission which permits one to dedicate his life, through devotion, to something beyond himself.
—Henry Miller
To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money. Money, money everywhere and still not enough! And then no money, or a little money, or less money, or more money but money always money . and if you have money , or you don’t have money, it is the money that counts, and money makes money, but what makes money make money?
—Henry Miller
Topics: Money
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
In the beginning was the Word. Man acts it out. He is the act, not the actor.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Creation
No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man’s front embraces the whole universe.
—Henry Miller
Topics: War, Space
Don’t look for miracles. You yourself are the miracle.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Miracles
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
Topographically the country is magnificent—and terrifying. Why terrifying? Because nowhere else in the world is the divorce between man and nature so complete. Nowhere have I encountered such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as here in America. Here boredom reaches its peak.
—Henry Miller
And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?
—Henry Miller
Topics: Potential
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: Writing, Authors & Writing, Writers
Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Procrastination, Life
We create our fate every day we live.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Fate
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
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Boredom
What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their inability to act according to their beliefs.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Commitment, Dedication, Belief
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
Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Arts, Art, Artists
Nine-tenths of our sickness can be prevented by right thinking plus right hygiene—nine-tenths of it.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Health, Meditation
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Kurt Vonnegut American Novelist
Gore Vidal American Novelist
Elizabeth Gilbert American Novelist
William S. Burroughs American Novelist
Anita Loos American Actor
David Foster Wallace American Novelist, Essayist
Robert Anton Wilson American Polymath
Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
Nelson Algren American Novelist