Henry Miller Quotes

Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change.

The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man.

I feel that America is essentially against the artist, that the enemy of America is the artist, because he stands for individuality and creativeness, and that's un-American somehow.

Wasn't the whole point of being an artist, or at least part of it, that you didn't have to wear a tie?

Great innovators and original thinkers and artists attract the wrath of mediocrities as lightning rods draw the flashes.

In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider.

An artist, if he's unselfish and passionate, is always a living protest. Just to open his mouth is to protest: against conformism, against what is official, public, or national, what everyone else feels comfortable with, so the moment he opens his mouth, an artist is engaged, because opening his mouth is always scandalous.

A citizen sticks to conventions, does whatever is social. Artists, of course, must reject all conventions. I see no differently in reconciling the best of both of these worlds.

Someone was always trying to put down my individuality and personality, making me sing Mozart arias that were nothing to do with me.

Working with Spike Lee was a dream of mine. It was amazing to be able to collaborate with such a visionary.

I'm not an activist. I'm a fantasist.

Be stupid, be dumb, be funny, if that's who you are. Don't try to be someone that society wants you to be; that's stupid. So be yourself.

It's like everybody try to sound the same exact way because they think it's going to get them some fame, but nah. You've got to be different.

I just gotta keep doing what I'm doing, and just continuing to grow and progress as an artist. People who are saying that about Lil B need to be innovative and not be tools.

Who's straight? I'm not. I am bent gouged pinched and tugged at, and squeezed into this funny shape. Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move, and now the flukey play is cramped and slow, a dream of constraint and cross-purpose, with each move forced, all pieces pinned and skewered and zugzwanged... But here and there we see these figures who appear to run on the true lines, and they are terrible examples. They're rich, usually.

In a moment when criticism shows a singular dearth of direction every man has to be a law unto himself in matters of theatre, writing, and painting. While the American Mercury and the new Ford continue to spread a thin varnish of Ritz over the whole United States there is a certain virtue in being unfashionable.

The writer is by nature a dreamer - a conscious dreamer.

You have a talent that comes from inside you, from your heart, not your fingers. What you have can’t ever go away. It’s what other people only dream about. You’re an artist.

If you want to look like the people next door, you're probably smothering yourself into your dreams.

Why do you have to be the same as the others? ...Most of them are stupid.

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight.

Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence.

A lot of times nerds are really artists listening to the beat of another drummer.

...a society without jaywalkers might indicate a society without artists.