All Quotes

"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."

"Love is the axis and breath of my life. The art I produce is a byproduct, an excrescence of love, the song I sing, the joy which must explode, the overabundance — that is all!"

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made of layers, cells, constellations."

"In creation alone there is the possibility of perfection."

"I miss the animal buoyancy of New York, the animal vitality. I did not mind that it had no meaning and no depth."

"Everything but happiness is neurosis."

"Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life."

"No desire of the body, but for what lies in there, what lies in the flesh, the world, the thought, the creation, the illumination."

"To withhold from living is to die ... the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you."

"I say quotations are literary. They are good only when dealing with ideas, not with experience. Experience should be pure, unique."

"I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry."

"Ecstasy is the moment of exaltation from wholeness!"

"Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness."

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."

"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

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

"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.""

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

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

"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 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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"The dream has to be translated into reality."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"We did not think that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to Sinai on May 14 would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it."

"I would like Gaza to sink into the sea, but that won’t happen, and a solution must be found."