Anais Nin
Anais Nin
Anaïs Ninwas an essayist and memoirist born to Cuban parents in France, where she was also raised. She spent some time in Spain and Cuba but lived most of her life in the United States where she became an established author. She wrote journals, novels, critical studies, essays, short stories, and erotica. A great deal of her work, including Delta of Venus and Little Birds, was published posthumously...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth21 February 1903
CityNanterre, France
CountryUnited States of America
Either one fails in one's art or in one's life.
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.
Asia discovered two remedies for the cruelty of man, art and religion. America discarded both and is drowning in hate and aggressivity.
America hates the artist. It will not admit: the artist is my soul and I want to kill off my soul.
perhaps the only magician we have is the artist.
The one who travels like a lover searching for a new passion is suddenly blessed with new eyes, new ears, new senses.
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.
Tropical nights are hammocks for lovers.
In New York the acoustics are good for laughter, for life is all external, all action, no thought, no meditation, no dreaming, no reflection, only the exuberance of action.
New York seems conducted by jazz, animated by it. It is essentially a city of rhythm.
Paris-New York, the two high tension magnetic poles between life, life of the senses, of the spirit in Paris, and life in action in New York.
New York has an electronic heart.
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.
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.