Quotes from Anais Nin

You are much much greater on women. Céline is arid.

He says: "You seem to have finished just suffering life and are beginning to dominate it." Just suffering life is not enough. I know.

When I saw you . . . I chose my body.

I don't like veering around from one thing to another—one day the analyst, the next day the dancer, the next day the movies, and so on. I know it's sheer desperation that provokes this. And I know it's because I am ineffective that causes it. So it's no reproach. I'm responsible. But what to do? What, what, what? It drives me nuts.

Miller is a far more distinguished mind than Céline.

There is a curious contradiction between those who complain that we have too many novels obsessed with the incapacity to achieve relationships and those who constantly upbraid the writers who deal exclusively with personal relationship. Men write about alienation and women about relationships. Feminine writing is often attacked as small, subjective, personal. The impotence to relate to another is the impotence to love others, and from this impotence to crime is a natural step.

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 & re-create myself…

Whore" goes, "Christ" goes, "shit" goes, etc. And yet somehow there is not the same ring behind his dirty words as with mine. Sincere enough, frank, honest, but not so raw. Almost seems justifiable. Mine seems flagrant and wanton.

I have never described, even in the diary, the act of self-murder which takes place after my being with people. A sense of shame for the most trivial defect, lack, slip, error, for every statement made, or for my silence, for being too gay or too serious, for not being earthy enough, or for being too passionate, for not being free, or being too impulsive, for not being myself or being too much so.

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension.

and said to Djuna: I am tired. And laid a despondent, a heavy head on her breast, his heavy body on her body, and all his unfulfilled desires, his aborted moments, lay down with his like stones in his pocket, weighing him down, so that the bed creaked with the inertia of his words: I wanted to do this, I wanted to do that, I want to change the world, I want to go and fight... But it is night already, the day has fallen apart, disintegrated in his hands.

Am I hypnotized, fascinated by evil because I have none in me? Or is there in me the greatest evil?

That is why I always lie. I can't have a truthful relationship. Gore's idealization of me sets my pattern. I begin truthfully, but then I withhold what hurts him, what would destroy his illusion. I hide my psychoanalysis, my real age, my sexual needs, my past lovers and experience, my negro lover, and I give him his dream, his ideal woman. But where am I in the end?

having faith that their life together, their adventures together, and the stories that they told each other, would soon take the place of the wine, believing that all the natural intoxications of caress would flow from her and not the barrel.

People are miserable and tense because they don't make love enough.

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

I have holes in my shoes. I do not pay my bills. I try to finish House of Incest.

The unconscious cannot express itself directly because it is a composite of past, present, future, a timeless alchemy of many dimensions. A direct statement, as for an act, would deprive it of its effectiveness. It is an image which bypasses the censor of the mind, affects our emotions and our senses. An act has to be interpreted on two levels—one as action, the other as meaning.

I have a natural flow in the diary: what I produce outside is a distillation, the myth, the poem. The elaboration is here. It is the gem made out of this natural outpouring. Shouldn't people prefer the gems?

Often he quarreled, warred, drank, with a company of ordinary friends, spent evenings with ignorant people. She could not do this. She liked the exceptional, the extraordinary.

What did I want? I wanted a life with you! And I get instead Radio City, the lights going up, "honey I love you," dancing all night, crap shooting, cellophane magic, chrome and black marble.

We'll burn them he said Burn them all she said with bitterness. To her this was not only an offering of peace to his tormenting jealousy, but a sudden anger at this pile of books whose contents had not prepared her for moments such as this one. All these novels so carefully concealing the truth about character, about the obscurities, the tangles, the mysteries. Words words words words and no revelation on the pitfalls, the abysms in which human beings found themselves.

When I awakened at dawn, I had a moment of repulsion, of shame. When my feelings aren't touched, I feel shame, as man does with the whore.

There is no doubt that the act of creation is very similar to the act of dreaming. The difference is that it includes an activity which has been difficult to analyze. It is not only the power to summon an image, but the power to compose with this image. The second faculty, the faculty of active creation, is what is missing from the use of drugs. Drugs induce passivity. Passivity, like the passivity of India induced by religion, is destructive both to human life and to art.