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I was always fascinated and inspired by the words of French author, Anaïs Nin.

Since my teens, just as for Anaïs Nin, writing shaped my personality and my life and gave it meaning and a way to escape from reality.

“I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, of which I can only escape by writing,” as she phrased it.

Here are 10 more quotes by Anaïs Nin to nourish the writer within you:

“I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me…I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living.  (In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays, 1976)

“We write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely…When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.”

“… You don’t write for yourself or for others. You write out of a deep inner necessity. If you are a writer, you have to write, just as you have to breathe, or if you’re a singer you have to sing.” (“The Artist as Magician,” interview, 1973)

She was a writer well ahead of her time, but her words still hold value for all of us who write.

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.”

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

“The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.”

Personally, my creativity is not a consistent flow; rather, ever-changing like tides and waves, but I learned through reading Anais Nin that it is completely normal. Once I made peace with this, I could tap into greater depths of my supply.

“I believe I could never exhaust the supply of material lying within me. The deeper I plunge, the more I discover. There is no bottom to my heart and no limit to the acrobatic feats of my imagination.”

“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.”

“How quickly the minutes fly when you are writing to please your heart. I pity those who write for money or for fame. Money is debasing, and fame transitory and exacting. But for your own heart…Oh, what a difference!”

“I am resolved to write, write, and write. Nothing can turn me away from a path I have definitely set myself to follow.”

I hope these quotes nourish the writer within you as much as they do for me, and help you to connect with what lies within you, to bring the best of the writer out of you.

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