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Anaïs Nin Quotes
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Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell , known professionally as Anaïs Nin, was an American essayist and diarist. Born to Cuban parents in France, Nin was the daughter of composer Joaquín Nin and Rosa Culmell, a classically-trained singer. Nin spent some time in Spain and Cuba, but lived most of her life in the United States, where she became an established author.

Beginning at age eleven, Nin prolifically wrote journals throughout her life, which spanned over sixty years up until her death. Her journals, many of which received publication during her life, detail her private thoughts and personal relationships, as well as detail surrounding the sexual abuse and incestuous relationship she had with her father. Also in her journals are details regarding her marriages to Hugh Parker Guiler and Rupert Pole, as well as her numerous affairs, including with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and writer Henry Miller, both of whom had a profound influence on her and her writing.

In addition to her journals, Nin wrote several novels, critical studies, essays, short stories, and several volumes of erotica. Much of her work, including the erotica collections Delta of Venus and Little Birds, was published posthumously amidst renewed critical interest in her and her work. Nin spent her later life in Los Angeles, California, where she died of cervical cancer in 1977.



✵ 21. February 1903 – 14. January 1977   •   Other names Anais Ninová
Anaïs Nin photo
Anaïs Nin: 278   quotes 87   likes

Anaïs Nin Quotes

“You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers — you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You are the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance.”

Anaïs Nin

August 1932 Henry and June
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Imagination , Idea , Thinking

“For me, the adventures of the mind, each inflection of thought, each movement, nuance, growth, discovery, is a source of exhilaration.”

Anaïs Nin

November, 1933
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

“Everything but happiness is neurosis.”

Anaïs Nin

Feb. 15, 1936
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Happiness

“I need a place where I can shout and weep. I have to be a Spanish savage at some time of the day. I record here the hysteria life causes in me. The overflow of an undisciplined extravagance. To hell with taste and art, with all contractions and polishings. Here I shout, I dance, I weep, I gnash my teeth, I go mad — all by myself, in bad English, in chaos. It will keep me sane for the world and for art.”

Anaïs Nin

Oct. 27, 1933 (writing about her diary)
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Life , World , Art , Hell

“Because so many of our writers were born in ugly environments, in monstrous poverty and humilitation, they continue to assert that this is the natural environment, reality, and that beauty is artifice. Why should the natural state be ugliness? Natural to whom? We may be born in ugliness, but the natural consequences should be a thirst for its opposite. To mistake ugliness for reality is one of the frauds of the realistic school. A hunger for the unknown, and an aspiration towards beauty were inseparable from civilization. In America the word art was distorted to mean artificial.
We are born with the power to alter what we are given at birth.
When the Japanese paint flowers or the sea on a kimono they mean to establish a link with nature. But they select only what is beautiful in nature to maintain their love of life.
The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything. That is the deepest meaning of rebellion, not the wearing of different clothes, haircuts, or the adopting of other cultures.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

School , Hunger , Clothes , Painting

“One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.
But paradoxically, we create fiction out of human concern for the victims of the revelations. This concern is at the root of literature.”

Anaïs Nin book The Diary of Anaïs Nin

The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Truth , Literature