Essayists From France

"Yet, what is their violence compared to mine, which was to accept theirs, to make it mine, to wish it for myself, to intercept it, to utilize it, to force it upon myself, to know it, to premeditate it, to discern and assume its perils? But what was mine, willed and necessary for my defense, my toughness, my rigor, compared to the violence they underwent like a malediction, risen from an inner fire simultaneously with an outer light which sets them ablaze and illuminates us?"

"To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance."

"Fierce and pure, I was the theater of a fairyland restored to life."

"By remaining inaccessible, he became the epitome of those whom I have named and who stagger me. I was therefore chaste."

"I suffered at the time from an ugliness I no longer find on my childhood face."

"If the hero join combat with night and conquer it, may shreds of it remain upon him!"

"But I would adore that thief who is my mother."

"But--criminals are remote from you--as in love, they turn away and turn me away from the world and its laws. Thiers smells of sweat, sperm, and blood. In short, to my body and my thristy soul it offers devotion. It was because their world contains these erotic conditions that I was bent on evil."

"The Day the Palestinians become institutionalized, I will no longer be on their side."

"So long as we were in a room in a brothel, we belonged to our fantasies, but once having exposed them, we're now tied up with human beings, tied to you and forced to go on with this adventure according to the laws of visibility."

"This violence is a calm that disturbs you."

"Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. I wondered at its perfect coherence, which rejected me."

"With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassimilable."

"There has been talk about (The Blacks) revival. Angelou comments: "It was a very important play. It still is an important play. It implies that, come the revolution, Blacks will be as bad and as greedy as Whites have been. What goes around comes around, which is a very Black statement, an African statement, too. "Working for me as a young woman, with the cast of The Blacks, was an incredible experience. The original cast included Cecily (sic) Tyson, James Earl Jones, Raymond St. Jacques, Roscoe Lee Browne, Lou Gossett, Charles Gordone, Helen Martin, Cynthia Belgrave, Jay Flash Riley, Lex Monson, Godfrey Cambridge, Ethel Ayler, and me. It was the thing to go into; if you were out of a job, go try out for The Blacks. It was wonderful to break down the play together. Obviously it fed all our artistic growth. "It would be interesting to see it today with some new people. All the [original] actors have done so many things since [that they] would bring so much other equipment to it now. Just like the time-instead of 1960-61, 1977 has its own rhythm and its own impetus."

"At night too, she puzzled the mystery of her desperate need of kindness. As other girls prayed for handsomeness in a lover, or for wealth, or for power, or for poetry, she had prayed fervently: let him be kind."

"Every writer establishes a role for themself in their books: Miss Nin's is that of psychoanalyst to her typical women. She has a single interest in her characters (I almost said patients) and that is in the formation and expression of their symptoms; what goes on in the rest of their lives she rigorously ignores…Every so often Miss Nin's writing descends from the feminine heights and indulges in straight commonsensical observation of human beings and even in undecorated prose. Then we recognize that somewhere in her Miss Nin has perhaps the powers that have always been necessary for good science, good fiction, good poetry. But such deviations are only occasional, so I wonder why a book like This Hunger...hasn't had commercial publication in these days when nothing sells like the sick psyche."

"I read there are writers who give you life whether or not they write well, it's very odd. I feel that way about Anaïs Nin, who sometimes I don't think writes well."

"God, is she an inspiration for me. I really found those books a guide to life, and life as a writer. It was wonderful what she said about creating your life, that your life has to be creative, and your writing has to be creative... She paid a price as a writer, having to hide part of the diary during her lifetime."

"Later, I found the great narcissist Anaïs Nin, read all of her profoundly self-absorbed diaries, I regret to say. But I had to do it. All the girls did."

"Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself."

"The day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."

"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are."

"We are beginning to see the influence of dream upon reality and reality upon dream."

"The unconscious can become destructive if it is disregarded and thwarted."

"The necessity for fiction was probably born of the problem of taboo on certain revelations. It was not only a need of the imagination but an answer to the limitations placed on portrayal of others."

"Because so many of our writers were born in ugly environments, in monstrous poverty and humilitation, they continue to assert that this is the natural environment, reality, and that beauty is artifice. Why should the natural state be ugliness? Natural to whom? We may be born in ugliness, but the natural consequences should be a thirst for its opposite. To mistake ugliness for reality is one of the frauds of the realistic school. A hunger for the unknown, and an aspiration towards beauty were inseparable from civilization. In America the word art was distorted to mean artificial. We are born with the power to alter what we are given at birth. When the Japanese paint flowers or the sea on a kimono they mean to establish a link with nature. But they select only what is beautiful in nature to maintain their love of life. The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything. That is the deepest meaning of rebellion, not the wearing of different clothes, haircuts, or the adopting of other cultures."

"Neurosis was caused by our attempt to separate physical and metaphysical levels, to set them up in opposition to each other, thus engaging in an internecine war. If it is true that we do live on several levels simultaneously- drama and action, past and present, personal and collective- we are given ways to unify them: one by religion, the other by art. Separating such levels is only necessary when they conflict, and separation is a result of conflict. Seeing how these levels can work together in harmony is the task of our contemporary writers."

"It was a misunderstanding to stress the dream like quality of the novels. What I meant to stress was the interrelation between dream and life, between dream and action."

"I think that natural truths will cease to be spat at us like insults, that aesthetics will once more be linked with ethics, and that people will become aware that in casting out aesthetics that they also cast out a respect for human life, a respect for creation, a respect for spiritual values. Aesthetics was an expression of man's need to be in love with his world. The cult of ugliness is a regression. It destroys our appetite, our love for our world."

"Passivity, like the passivity of India induced by religion, is destructive both to human life and to art."

"By shutting out the outside world, drugs place one not only in confrontation with the dreaming self, but also ones nightmares."

"The hallucinatory drugs only reveal the world of images we contain but do not teach us interpretation, illumination, or enlightenment."

"The dream, scrutinized by scientists in various experiments, has been found to be an absolute necessity to man."

"Most fiction writers uses dreams decoratively without relating them to daily life, but the contemporary writer is becoming more expert at detecting the influence of one upon the other."

"For the neurotic, the merging of the subconscious and the conscious may be risky, just as it is for the users of drugs. But for the writer who is aware of the way in which this connection exists in reality and nourishes creativity, the sooner he can achieve a synthesis among intellect, emotion, and instinct, the sooner his work will be integrated."

"The dream has to be translated into reality."

"When she did finally fall asleep it was the restless sleep of the night watchman continuously aware of danger and of the treacheries of time seeking to cheat her by permitting clocks to strike the passing hours when she was not awake to grasp their contents."

"The enemy of a love is never outside, it's not a man or woman, it's what we lack in ourselves."

"You are like a person who consumes herself in love and giving and does not know the miracles that are born of this."

"I love your silences, they are like mine. You are the only being before whom I am not distressed by my own silences. You have a vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences, it is a strangely alive silence, like a trap open over a well, from which one can hear the secret murmur of the earth itself."

"I feel a fatigue of the tongue seeking to utter impossible things until it twists itself into a knot and chokes me. I feel a fatigue at this mass of nerves seeking to uphold a world that is falling apart. I feel a fatigue at feeling, at the fervor of my dreams, the fever of my thought, the intensity of my hallucinations. A fatigue at the sufferings of others and my own. I feel my own blood thundering inside of me, I feel the horror of falling into abysms. But you and I would always fall together and I would not be afraid. We would fall into abysms, but you would carry your phosphorescences to the very bottom of the abysms. We could fall together and ascend together, far into space. I was always exhausted by my dreams, not because of the dreams, but because of the fear of not being able to return. I do not need to return. I will find you everywhere. You alone can go wherever I go, into the same mysterious regions. You too know the language of the nerves. You will always know what I am saying even if I do not."

"I am the one who has felt most deeply the stuttering of the tongue in its relation to thought."

"All those who try to unveil the mysteries always have tragic lives. At the end they are always punished."

"At a lecture I am asked to pronounce my name three times. I try to be slow and emphatic, "Anaïs — Anaïs — Anaïs. You just say "Anna" and then add "ees," with the accent on the "ees.""

"I would say that compassion for our parents is the true sign of maturity."

"The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness."

"One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed. But paradoxically, we create fiction out of human concern for the victims of the revelations. This concern is at the root of literature."

"The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it. He hopes to impose his particular vision and share it with others. And when the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others. We also write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely. We write as the birds sing, as the primitives dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it. When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing."

"Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art."

"Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic."