If I am against the condition of the world, it is not because I am a moralist - it is because I want to laugh more.
— Henry Miller
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.
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.
Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future, too, like something out of Fritz Lang's feeble 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.
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.
One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.
Sin, guilt, neurosis; they are one and the same, the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything except his own nature.
And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?
I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.
Madness is tonic and invigorating. It makes the sane more sane. The only ones who are unable to profit by it are the insane.
It isn't the oceans which cut us off from the world - it's the American way of looking at things.
Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.
The real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way.
No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance.
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.
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 tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we're passing one another without a look of recognition.
Back of every creation, supporting it like an arch, is faith. Enthusiasm is nothing: it comes and goes. But if one believes, then miracles occur.
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.
The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death.
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.
The world is the mirror of myself dying.
What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?
Instead of asking 'How much damage will the work in question bring about?' why not ask 'How much good? How much joy?'
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.
What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.
What distinguishes the majority of men from the few is their ability to act according to their beliefs.
Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.
We should read to give our souls a chance to luxuriate.
The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.
Plots and character don't make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip.
An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
Analysis brings no curative powers in its train; it merely makes us conscious of the existence of an evil, which, oddly enough, is consciousness.
The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
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.
Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.
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.
It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.
The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.
Honest criticism means nothing: what one wants is unrestrained passion, fire for fire.
All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.
In the beginning was the Word. Man acts it out. He is the act, not the actor.
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.
The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love.
Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
We live at the edge of the miraculous.
If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.
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.
