Anais Nin Excerpts

"The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself."


"I have tried not to be neurotic, not romantic, not desctructive, but I may be all of these in disguises."


"Poetry is a cause too. It gives us strength and faith to go to battle, to endure."


"The world of myth...alone makes the monstrosities of history bearable."


"Will the outer life become so strong that the inner life will disappear?"


"Will the outer life become so strong that the inner on will disappear? The inner eye mirroring all is less active. The withdrawal to commune, to relieve, to ruminate, to conserve and interpret, is less frequent. Hardly time to tell what is happening to me. Others' lives, others' happenings."


"I use analysis to orient myself, but once I have found my bearings, I take to my submarin again and plunge back into the deep, below the level of analysis, words, discussions. I am now in that realm, wherein living and writing have their source."


We must have an inner life to act as an antedote to the poisons of daily life, to alchemize events.


"We are only trapped if we choose to be/"


"I saw art as a drug, the only drug left to me now that I am losing illusion."


"A snowstorm. I was working This Hunger, when my typewriter broke down. I went out into the snow with it to get it repaired. When I came back, I did  not feel like wrikting the continuation of Djuna's life at the orphan asylum and her hunger. I felt like writing about snow. I wrote every image, every sensation, every fantasy I had experienced during my walk. The snowstorm had thrown me back into the past, into my innocent adolescence, surrounded by desires, at sixteen, intimidated, tense. I compared my adolescence with the frozen adolescence of others around me today. They all fused: snow, the frost of fear, the ice of virginity, purity, innocence, and always the sudden danger of melting. I wrote myself out. And when I was finished, I realized I had described Djuna's adolescence, and the adolescent contractions of other adolescents. I had written thiry-eight mapges on the snow in women and men, on Djuna and the asylum, her hunger."


That's one of the most beautiful descriptions of the creative process I've ever encountered.


"Days of feverish inspiration, a flood of spontaneous writing. Onrush of associations, of impromptu anecdotes, utter freedom." I want to be there, more than anything else in the world.


"I like it best when I am submerged in symphony, and when the world in my head becomes a world of images and music."


"If the intellect has killed writing, then let the other kind of writing, emotional, kill the intellect."


"I make my concession to reality. I work at the press for eight hours. Then I come home and work on the novel."



"I, myself, concentrated so much on my sixth sense that I developed this vision which sees beyond facts, the better to find sensations and divinations. It is possible I never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire. It is possible I avoided learning the names of composers and their music the better to close my eyes and listen to the mystery of all music as an ocean. It may be I have not learned dates in history in order to reach the essence of timelessness. It may be I never learned geography the better to map my own routes and discover my own lands. The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unknown was my science and progress."