Anais Nin Quotes

If you can't create, you destroy.

There is an ugliness in being paid for work one does not like.

[On Paris:] A city never entirely known, yet which gives you the feeling of intimacy, of possessing it intimately.

All the art of analysis consists in saying a truth only when the other person is ready for it, has been prepared for it by an organic process of gradation and evolution.

When I don't write, I feel my world shrink. I lose my fire, my color.

I wanted to remember in order to be able to return.

I like extravagance. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometers.

Poverty is the great reality. That is why the artist seeks 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.

Physical experiences, lacking the joys of love, depend on twists and perversions of pleasure. Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones.

It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.

Death from disillusion is not instantaneous, and there are no mercy killers for the disillusioned.

But the artist persists because he has the will to create, and this is the magic power which can transform and transfigure and transpose and which will ultimately be transmitted to others.

If you are terribly truthful, the ground will always move from under you, and you will have to shift with the constantly shifting truth.

To write at the same temperature at which I live I should write nothing but poetry.

I'm sick of my own romanticism!

The dream has to be translated into reality.

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.

Nothing endures unless it has first been transposed into a myth, and the great advantage of myths is that they are ladies with portable roots.

The period without the diary remains an ordeal. Every evening I want my diary as one wants opium.

gold never comes to the dreamers - except in dreams.

notes fly so much farther than words. There is no other way to reach the infinite.

In creation alone there is the possibility of perfection.

New York has an electronic heart.

Will you come down and kiss me good night?

Strange, isn't it, that no chemical will give a human being the iridescence that illusions have given them? Give me your hat.

He has, like me, a sense of smell. I let him inhale me, then I slip away.

Our age has need of violence," he writes. And he is violence.

He understands my pity for his ridiculous, humiliating physical necessity.

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.

To commit suicide is easy. To live without a god is more difficult. The drunkenness of triumph is greater than the drunkenness of sacrifice.

she acquired the certainty of the expansion of time by depth of emotion, range and infinite multiplicity of experience.

The leaf fall of his words, the stained glass hues of his moods, the rust in his voice, the smoke in his mouth, his breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror.

Anxiety is love's greatest killer, because it is like the stranglehold of the drowning.

I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama.

A man who lives unrelated to other human beings dies. But a man who lives unrelated to himself also dies.

My diary seems to keep me whole.

Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons.

Keeping a Diary all my life helped me to discover some basic elements essential to the vitality of writing.

I will not be just a tourist in a world of images.

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we ... believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

Analysis does not take into account the creative products of neurotic desires.

I want to make my own discoveries…….penetrate the evil which attracts me

She walked in the shadow of Rango with a great feeling of being taken out of herself, of having no knowledge of what was happening to her, merely a pervading sense of flow.

The way to recognize a dead word is that it exudes boredom.

This image of herself as a not ordinary women, an image which was trembling now in his eyes, might suddenly disappear. Nothing more difficult to live up to than men's dreams.

Most artists have retired too absolutely; they grow rusty, inflexible to the flow of currents.

I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love.

I want to fall in love in such a way that the mere sight of a man, even a block away from me, will shake and pierce me, will weaken me, and make me tremble and soften and melt.

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