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Writing Quotes by Anais Nin

58 Writing quotes by Anais Nin

All Writing quotes Anais Nin’s page

Anais Nin says we write to build a world where we can live and feel safe. She believes that writing changes how we see everyday things, shaking familiar scenes so new meaning appears like magic. She also describes writing as a way to taste life twice—once while it happens and again when we look back.

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I write emotional algebra.

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Write. Write until it stops hurting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.”

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

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

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One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.

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I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space,…

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“I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very…

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The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter,…

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When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire…

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A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid…

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Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the…

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“We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in…

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It amazes me that you feel that each time you write a story you give away one of your dreams and you…

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To mistake ugliness for reality is one of the frauds of the realistic school [of writing]. A hunger for the unknown and…

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That is my essential reason for writing, not for fame, not to be celebrated after death, but to heighten and create life…

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The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive.…

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I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had…

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Three or four threads may be agitated, like telegraph wires, at the same time, and if I were to tap them all…

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The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have...excessive living weighs…

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“I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very…

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We also write to heighten our own awareness of life... We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection...…

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“Henry's recollections of the past, in contrast to Proust, are done while in movement. He may remember his first wife while making…

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

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“A writer, who was a celebrity in Paris, had entered her shop one day. He was not looking for a hat. He…

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“The old concept of chronological, orderly, symmetrical development of character died when it was discovered that the unconscious motivations are entirely at…

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“What I corrupted was what is called the truth in favour of a more marvelous world. I could always improve on the…

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“The other night we talked about literature's elimination of the unessential, so that we are given a concentrated "dose" of life. I…

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

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

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

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

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The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer.

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

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More by Anais Nin

I wanted to remember in order to be able to return.

“…For love it is never the same. What goes on inside is never the same just like this music which changes every instant. For…

Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body's breath, and the strings' wails and moans are…

I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less…

We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.

Strange, isn't it, that no chemical will give a human being the iridescence that illusions have given them? Give me your hat.

The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic.

Introspection is a devouring monster. You have to feed it with much material, much experience, many people, many places, many loves, many creations, and…

In each studio there is a human being dressed in the full regalia of his myth fearing to expore a vulnerable opening, spreading not…

I don't mind working, holding my ground intellectually, artistically; but as a woman, oh, God, as a woman I want to be dominated

“Laughter and tears are not separate experiences, with intervals of rest: they rush out together and it is like walking with a sword between…

The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others.

I write emotional algebra.

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

I say quotations are literary. They are good only when dealing with ideas, not with experience. Experience should be pure, unique.