Anais Nin Quotes

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.

I don't believe that artists really are interested in money. That's not the motivation for art.

I paint for myself. I don't know how to do anything else, anyway. Also I have to earn my living, and occupy myself.

Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

I just wanted to be an artist. I didn't care how or what; I just wanted to express my artistic integrity, and I wanted the world to have a vision of what I was seeing in my mind.

I think it's the pain and suffering that drive you to become an artist. The art itself should be the pain, sort of exorcising every demon and making you feel like you're a person that matters.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

I consider myself first of all an artist. My work is about my creativity - why I create and not for whom.

As an artist, I want to interpret my feelings

An original is a creation motivated by desire.

Art for art's sake, and creation for creation's sake, and love for love's sake

What I became a comedian for was to get my art out. To get some of these feelings and things I had on my chest out. I don't care if people believe them, listen to them, change their ways, or think, or any of that kind of crap. I'm interested in showing off. I'm the same kid from sixth grade who stood up and said "watch this."

Work is what you do for others, liebchen. Art is what you do for yourself.

The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.

Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement.

We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth.

I don't think of myself as making art. I do what I do because I want to, because painting is the best way I've found to get along with myself.

The most joyous painting is not done for the art world, it is done for the inner world.

Art is not politics. The glory of the novel is that in its essence, it is a democratic form, because it treats individuals as worthy of scrutiny. That alone is a kind of political act. A good novel about a tea party of rich women can be just as galvanizing and important to the soul as War and Peace, so I think it's not really the job of artists to do anything. They can have their opinions as private citizens, but they must continue making their art.

Art is made by the alone for the alone.

What’s the impulse behind art? It’s saying in whatever language is the language of your work, “If I could move you as much as it moved me … if I can move anyone a tenth as much as that moved me, if I can spark the same sense of mystery and awe and surprise as that sparked in me, well that’s why I do what I do.”

Good or bad, the one thing I can say about my art is, if I can quote Sinatra, I did it my way.

I think I have always had a pretty strong creative impulse. And that has probably saved me from abandoning myself completely.

We have nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore- except to make our lives into a work of art.

I just want to paint and say what I'm going to say.