Anais Nin Art Quotations

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art--we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.

Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth.

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. Albert Einstein It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

I don't wish power, only art -art and passion.

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 ...

For all of my patients sensuality is a giving in to 'the low side of their nature.' Puritanism is powerful and distorts their life with a total anesthesia of the senses. If you atrophy one sense, you also atrophy all the others, a sensuous and physical connection with nature, with art, with food, with other human beings.

Asia discovered two remedies for the cruelty of man, art and religion. America discarded both and is drowning in hate and aggressivity.

To mistake ugliness for reality is one of the frauds of the realistic school [of writing]. A hunger for the unknown and an aspiration toward beauty were inseparable from civilization. In America the word art was distorted to mean artificial.

Either one fails in one's art or in one's life.

Life, religion and art all converge in Bali. They have no word in their language for 'artist' or 'art.' Everyone is an artist.

Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

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.