Anaïs Nin noted in her diary: The same thing which makes Henry indestructible is what makes me indestructible: It is that at the core of us is a writer, not a human being.
You know, Lillian, someday I will sit down and write a little dictionary for you, a little Chinese dictionary. In it I will put down all the interpretations of what is said to you, the right interpret...
You had to account for every move, arrival or exit. In the world there was a conspiracy against improvisation. It was only permitted in jazz.
Will I really be able to accept my mental loneliness?
Why does a gesture, a walk, stir your blood? What a mystery this is, desire. The love sickness, the sensitivity, the obsession, the flutter of the heart, the ebb and flow of the blood. There is no dru...
Why do I doubt her? Perhaps she is just very sensitive, and hypersensitive people are false when others doubt them; they waver. And one thinks them insincere. Yet I want to believe her. At the same ti...
When he first stepped out of the car and walked towards the door where I stood waiting, I saw a man I liked. In his writing he is flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent. He's a man whom life makes dr...
We speak of the masculine and the feminine, but they are the wrong labels. It is really more a matter of poetry versus intellectualization.
There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work.
The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relationship to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes univer...
The struggle to emerge out of the past, clean of memories; the inadequacy of our hearts to cut life into separate and final portions; the pain of this constant ambivalence and interrelation of emotion...
The physical as a symbol of the spiritual world. The people who keep old rags, old useless objects, who hoard, accumulate: are they also keepers and hoarders of old ideas, useless information, lovers...
The most haunting woman is the one we cannot find in the crowded café when we are looking for her, the one that we must hunt for, and seek out through the disguises of her stories.
That night Fay became a woman, making a secret of her pain, intent on saving her happiness with Albert, on showing wisdom and subtlety.
Secrets. Need to disguise. The novel was born of this.
Se vive así, cobijado en un mundo delicado, y uno cree que vive. Entonces lee un libro (Lady Chatterley, por ejemplo), o va de viaje, o habla con Richard, y descubre que no vive, que está simplemente...
Over and over again I sail towards joy, which is never in the room with me, but always near me, across the way, like those rooms full of gayety one sees from the street, or the gayety in the street on...
Now that I am moving, I am afraid. Where am I going?
My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea, and my eyes are the color of water.
Man is always trying to create a woman who will fill his needs, and that makes her untrue to herself.