Anais Nin Writing Quotations

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.

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.

My ideas usually come not at my desk writing but in the midst of living.

You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.

We. . .write to heighten our own awareness of life. . .We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. . We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it...to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. . .to expand our world, when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely. . .When I don't write I feel my world shrinking. I feel I lose my fire, my color.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.

It is in the movements of emotional crisis that human beings reveal themselves most accurately.

The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to write about them.

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

I needed to live, but I also needed to record what I lived.

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 gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.

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.

It amazes me that you feel that each time you write a story you give away one of your dreams and you feel the poorer for it. But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love. How is this world made which you enjoy, the friends around me that you love? They came because I first gave away my stories.

That is my essential reason for writing, not for fame, not to be celebrated after death, but to heighten and create life all around me. I also write because when I am writing I reach the high moment of fusion sought by the mystics, the poets, the lovers, a sense of communion with the universe.

Write. Write until it stops hurting.

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

Writing more and more to the sound of music, writing more and more like music. Sitting in my studio tonight, playing record after record, writing, music a stimulant of the highest order, far more potent than wine.

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.

I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely ignored.

To write is to descend, to excavate, to go underground.

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

The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have...excessive living weighs down the imagination: we will not live, we will only write and talk to swell the sails.

Three or four threads may be agitated, like telegraph wires, at the same time, and if I were to tap them all I would reveal such a mixture of innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and courage, I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four journals at once.

Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.

I write emotional algebra.

I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

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