anais nin
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Famous Advice on Writing
The collected wisdom of great writers, including Vonnegut, Hemingway, Didion, Sontag, Fitzgerald, Orwell, Kerouac, Atwood, Steinbeck, and more:
Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.
Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.
Anaïs Nin, born on this day in 1903, on why emotional excess is essential to creativity
For Anaïs Nin’s 110th birthday today, one of her most poignant insights on love, illustrated by Debbie Millman.
Available as a print, with 100% of proceeds benefiting a foundation supporting women writers and artists.
Introducing The Reconstructionists – a yearlong illustrated celebration of trailblazing women across art, science and literature, who have changed the way we define ourselves as a culture and live our lives as individuals of any gender.
I am more interested in human beings than in writing, more interested in lovemaking than in writing, more interested in living than in writing.
Defense of the Fluid Self – why Anaïs Nin turned down a Harper’s Bazaar profile.
Anaïs Nin on love, hand-lettered by Debbie Millman – hardly gets better than this. Available as a limited-edition print benefiting A Room of Her Own, a foundation supporting women artists and writers.
In other men most of their life is repressed by the bourgeois structure, their professional, social, and community mores. The artist retains his sensibility; it is the element he needs for his profession. The artist matches his life to his needs and lives by his own design and does not conform to patterns made by others. The artist lives more in harmony with his own character and is closer to freedom and individuality, and therefore integrity.
Anaïs Nin, echoing Eleanor Roosevelt’s timeless insight on conformity and integrity, and adding to history’s finest definitions of art.
Rare, stunning black-and-white engravings from Anaïs Nin’s 1944 hand-made book Under a Glass Bell, presaging modern self-publishing entrepreneurship.
Character has ceased to be a mystery and we can no longer refuse our responsibility with the excuse that this is an unformed, chaotic, eyeless, unpredictable force which drives, tosses, breaks us at will.
Anaïs Nin, 1948
We cannot always place responsibility outside of ourselves, on parents, nations, the world, society, race, religion.
…all the evils of the city: ambition, vanity, quest for success in money, the continuous contagious presence of power-driven, obsessed individuals who want to become known, to be in the limelight, noticed, as if life among millions gave you a desperate illness, a need of rising above the crowd, being noticed, existing individually, singled out from a mass of ants and sheep.
