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
The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Heroes/Heroism, Action, Secrets of Success, Heroes
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
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
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: Love, Passion, How to Live
Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don’t take it too seriously.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Music
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: Deception/Lying, Lies
Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Discovery
Reality is not protected or defended by laws, proclamations, ukases, cannons and armadas. Reality is that which is sprouting all the time out of death and disintegration.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Reality
The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough is love.
—Henry Miller
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: Space, War
I didn’t have to think up so much as a comma or a semicolon; it was all given, straight from the celestial recording room. Weary, I would beg for a break, an intermission, time enough, let’s say, to go to the toilet or take a breath of fresh air on the balcony. Nothing doing!
—Henry Miller
Topics: Inspirational, Inspiration
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
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Potential
Our diseases are our attachments.
—Henry Miller
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
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
Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Art, Artists, Arts
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.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Civilization
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
Don’t look for miracles. You yourself are the miracle.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Miracles
I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Reading
Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heart-ache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, to discover what is already there.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Confidence
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
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
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
A book is not only a friend, it makes friends for you. When you have possessed a book with mind and spirit, you are enriched. But when you pass it on you are enriched threefold.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Reading
Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Swearing, Profanity, Vulgarity
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
Nine-tenths of our sickness can be prevented by right thinking plus right hygiene—nine-tenths of it.
—Henry Miller
Topics: Health, Meditation
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
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