1) Work on one thing at a time until finished.2) Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring."3) Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.4) Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!5) When you can't create you can work.6) Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.7) Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.8) Don't be a drought-horse! Work with pleasure

— Henry Miller

A beautiful nap this afternoon that put velvet between my vertebrae.

— Henry Miller

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.

— Henry Miller

A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation... 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

All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.

— Henry Miller

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

— Henry Miller

And for that one moment of freedom you have to listen to all that love crap... it drives me nuts sometimes... I want to kick them out immediately... I do now and then. But that doesn't keep them away. They like it, in fact. The less you notice them the more they chase after you. There's something perverse about women... they're all masochists at heart.

— Henry Miller

And her delicacy offended. Who wants a delicate whore! Claude would even ask you to turn your face away when she squatted over the bidet. All wrong! A man, when he's burning up with passion, wants to see things; he wants to see everything, even how they make water.

— Henry Miller

And when he got through I felt for the first time that there had really been a war and that the man I was listening had been in it and that despite his bravery the war had made him a coward and that if he did any more killing it would be wide-awake and in cold blood, and nobody would have the guts to send him to the electric chair because he had performed his duty toward his fellow men, which was to deny his own sacred instincts and so everything was just and fair because one crime washes away the other in the name of God, country and humanity, peace be with you all.

— Henry Miller

Art consists in going the full length. If you start with the drums you have to end with dynamite, or TNT.

— Henry Miller