Explore Quotes by Anais Nin

The leaf fall of his words, the stained glass hues of his moods, the rust in his voice, the smoke in his mouth, his breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror.

From the backstabbing co-worker to the meddling sister-in-law, you are in charge of how you react to the people and events in your life. You can either give negativity power over your life or you can choose happiness instead. Take control and choose to focus on what is important in your life. Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.

If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.

Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying 'You gave me the wrong key!

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.

There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.

I have no brakes on...analysis is for those who are paralyzed by life.

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

Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.

The true liberation of eroticism lies in accepting the fact that there are a million facets to it, a million forms of eroticism, a million objects of it, situations, atmospheres, and variations. We have, first of all, to dispense with guilt concerning its expansion, then remain open to it's surprises, varied expressions, and mingle it with dreams, fantasies, and emotion for it to attain its highest potency.

Balance is not to be sought by association with others; it must exist within one's self.

I only believe in fire. Life. Fire. Being myself on fire I set others on fire. Never death. Fire and life.

We are cruel when someone refuses to play the role in which we have cast him. We judge a person only according to his relationship towards us.

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

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

The richest source of creation is feeling, followed by a vision of its meaning.

The secret of life was Breath. That was what I always wanted my words to do, to Breathe.

The fiery moments of passionate experience are the moments of wholeness and totality of the personality.

I will not be just a tourist in a world of images.

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.

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.