The Novel of the Future Quotes

“The old concept of chronological, orderly, symmetrical development of character died when it was discovered that the unconscious motivations are entirely at odds with fabricated conventions. Human beings do not grow in perfect symmetry. They oscillate, expand, contract, backtrack, arrest themselves, retrogress, mobilize, atrophy in part, proceed erratically according to experience and traumas. Some aspects of the personality mature, others do not. Some live in the past, some in the present. Some people are futuristic characters, some are cubistic, some are hard-edged, some geometric, some abstract, some impressionistic, some surrealistic!”
― Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future

“To capture the drama of the unconscious, one had to start with the key, and the key was the dream. But the novelist’s task was to pursue this dream, to unravel its meaning; the goal was to reach the relation of dream to life; the suspense was in finding this which led to a deeper significance of our acts.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future

“I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it does not match the subtlety of our minds or emotions, the multimedia of our unconscious life.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future

“There is a curious contradiction between those who complain that we have too many novels obsessed with the incapacity to achieve relationships and those who constantly upbraid the writers who deal exclusively with personal relationship. Men write about alienation and women about relationships. Feminine writing is often attacked as small, subjective, personal. The impotence to relate to another is the impotence to love others, and from this impotence to crime is a natural step.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future

“We carefully observe and watch the happenings of the entire world without realizing they are projections of our inner selves.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future

“The dream then, instead of being something apart from reality, a private world of fantasy or imagination, is actually an essential part of our reality which can be shared and communicated by means of imagery.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future

“For the writer the conscious mind may be the great inhibitor, the great censor. This conscious mind is created by social mores, education, environment, family pressures, and conventions. For creativity it is necessary to work with the unconscious which accumulates pure experience, reactions, impressions, intuitions, images, memories—an unconscious freed from the negative effect of societal evaluations. The conscious mind can only act later as critic, selector, discarder.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future

“The day we cease to take nourishment from the underground rivers of the psyche, we feel life is empty. We only become aware of alienation when neurosis sets in as the symptom of its existence.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future

“With the use of drugs people became passive, uncreative tourists in the world of images.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future

“There is no doubt that the act of creation is very similar to the act of dreaming. The difference is that it includes an activity which has been difficult to analyze. It is not only the power to summon an image, but the power to compose with this image. The second faculty, the faculty of active creation, is what is missing from the use of drugs. Drugs induce passivity. Passivity, like the passivity of India induced by religion, is destructive both to human life and to art.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future

“The unconscious cannot express itself directly because it is a composite of past, present, future, a timeless alchemy of many dimensions. A direct statement, as for an act, would deprive it of its effectiveness. It is an image which bypasses the censor of the mind, affects our emotions and our senses. An act has to be interpreted on two levels—one as action, the other as meaning.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future

“For the neurotic, the merging of the subconscious and the conscious may be risky, just as it is for the users of drugs. But for the writer who is aware of the way in which this connection exists in reality and nourishes creativity, the sooner he can achieve a synthesis among intellect, intuition, emotion, and instinct, the sooner his work will be integrated.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future

“Robert Haas told me of a painter who went to Freud and said: “You interpret dreams, and I teach people how to dream.”
― Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future