Anaïs Nin Quotes

We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.

We are beginning to see the influence of dream upon reality and reality upon dream.

The unconscious can become destructive if it is disregarded and thwarted.

The necessity for fiction was probably born of the problem of taboo on certain revelations. It was not only a need of the imagination but an answer to the limitations placed on portrayal of others.

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.

Neurosis was caused by our attempt to separate physical and metaphysical levels, to set them up in opposition to each other, thus engaging in an internecine war. If it is true that we do live on several levels simultaneously- drama and action, past and present, personal and collective- we are given ways to unify them: one by religion, the other by art. Separating such levels is only necessary when they conflict, and separation is a result of conflict. Seeing how these levels can work together in harmony is the task of our contemporary writers.

It was a misunderstanding to stress the dream like quality of the novels. What I meant to stress was the interrelation between dream and life, between dream and action.

I think that natural truths will cease to be spat at us like insults, that aesthetics will once more be linked with ethics, and that people will become aware that in casting out aesthetics that they also cast out a respect for human life, a respect for creation, a respect for spiritual values. Aesthetics was an expression of man's need to be in love with his world. The cult of ugliness is a regression. It destroys our appetite, our love for our world.

Passivity, like the passivity of India induced by religion, is destructive both to human life and to art.

By shutting out the outside world, drugs place one not only in confrontation with the dreaming self, but also ones nightmares.

The hallucinatory drugs only reveal the world of images we contain but do not teach us interpretation, illumination, or enlightenment.

The dream, scrutinized by scientists in various experiments, has been found to be an absolute necessity to man.

Most fiction writers uses dreams decoratively without relating them to daily life, but the contemporary writer is becoming more expert at detecting the influence of one upon the other.

For the neurotic, the merging of the subconscious and the conscious may be risky, just as it is for the users of drugs. But for the writer who is aware of the way in which this connection exists in reality and nourishes creativity, the sooner he can achieve a synthesis among intellect, emotion, and instinct, the sooner his work will be integrated.

The dream has to be translated into reality.