Anaïs Nin

Born 21 February 1903 · Died 14 January 1977

From Neuilly-sur-Seine, Île-de-France, France · Nationality: United States, France, Cuba · Writes fiction

Anaïs Nin is known internationally for her diary, eleven volumes of which have been published. The 35,000 handwritten pages of her journals are currently located in the UCLA library.

Quotes

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”
p. 40
“The morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart.”
House of Incest 1936
“Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons.”
House of Incest 1936
“When one is pretending the entire body revolts.”
Winter of Artifice 1939
“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source, it dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds, it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings, but never of natural death.”
p. 48

Quotes from Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Books by Anaïs Nin in order

Books by Anaïs Nin in the order they were published, from D.H. Lawrence (1932) to In Favor of the Sensitive Man, and Other Essays (1994).

If you like Anaïs Nin

Authors readers of Anaïs Nin often like, from our AI-written notes

Henry MillerA close friend and literary associate of Nin in Paris in the 1930s; his novels such as Tropic of Cancer share her frankness about sex and Paris bohemian life.
Djuna BarnesA modernist writer whose novel Nightwood shares Nin's interest in psychological intensity and experimental prose about women and desire.
Virginia WoolfHer diaries and her experimental fiction share Nin's focus on inner life, memory and the writer's self.
ColetteA French writer known for frank treatment of sexuality and women's inner lives, and for a Paris setting.
Sylvia PlathHer journals and her intense, confessional writing about women's inner conflicts appeal to readers who come to Nin's diary for similar reasons.
Marguerite DurasA French writer whose fiction is fragmentary and psychologically charged, and who writes about desire and memory in ways that some Nin readers find related.