Novelists From France

"I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."

"No one but a woman in love ever sees the maximum of men's greatness ."

"Oh, God, I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love. I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers, flowers with fingers giving me acute, acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness. Music inside of one, drunkenness. Only closing the eyes and remembering, and the hunger, the hunger for more, more, the great hunger, the voracious hunger, and thirst."

"I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama."

"He left me at my hotel at 3:00 AM murmuring: "You're marvelous.""

"The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy."

"The times in his studio when he washed his hands and they smoked, for his hands were so warm and the water so cold."

"Someday I'll be locked up for love insanity. "She loved too much.""

"I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less creative the next day."

"You cannot save people, you can only love them."

"He was insane with anger. Or is all insanity anger?"

"People living deeply have no fear of death."

"For me, the adventures of the mind, each inflection of thought, each movement, nuance, growth, discovery, is a source of exhilaration."

"When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with."

"I need a place where I can shout and weep. I have to be a Spanish savage at some time of the day. I record here the hysteria life causes in me. The overflow of an undisciplined extravagance. To hell with taste and art, with all contractions and polishings. Here I shout, I dance, I weep, I gnash my teeth, I go mad — all by myself, in bad English, in chaos. It will keep me sane for the world and for art ."

"I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself."

"I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing."

"This abdiction of life demanded of the artist is to be achieved only relatively. Most artists have retired too absolutely; they grow rusty, inflexible to the flow of currents."

"You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers — you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You are the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance."

"There will never be darkness because in both of us there's always movement, renewal, surprises. I have never known stagnation. Not even introspection has been a still experience..."

"I see myself wrapped in lies, which do not seem to penetrate my soul, as if they are not really a part of me. They are like costumes."

"To lie, of course, is to engender insanity."

"The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others."

"Love reduces the complexity of living."

"Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a worldly way."

"Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress, my hairdresser, my makeup, it will all work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments."

"Man can never know the kind of loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in a woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. The woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which he has bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love is a taking of man within her, and act of birth and rebirth, of child bearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for a woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment when man rests inside of her."

"We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds."

"Passion gives me moments of wholeness."

"My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living."

"For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds..."

"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."

"In the world of the dreamer there was solitude: all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living. They took place in solitude. But with action came anxiety, and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream, and with it came weariness, discouragement, and the flight into solitude again. And then in solitude, in the opium den of remembrance, the possibility of pleasure again."

"Only in the fever of creation could she recreate her own lost life."

"When one is pretending the entire body revolts."

"If only we could all escape from this house of incest, where we only love ourselves in the other, if only I could save you all from yourselves."

"Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons."

"My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea and my eyes are the color of water. I looked with chameleon eyes upon the changing face of the world, looked with anonymous vision upon my uncompleted self. I remember my first birth in water."