Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955
“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 — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. 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. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.”
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From Evelyn Lau’s Inside Out, Anchor Canada, 2001:
“When did it start, this obsession, this moral compass turning and fixing in this singular direction? I remember making a pact when I was nine years old, during all those hours I lay awake in bed, with the larger presence I felt around me in the darkness. I called him my writing god. Religion was nonexistent in our household, dismissed as a waste of time by my practical parents, and indeed the books that my Catholic aunts passed to me, with their rather graphic illustrations that produced a curious tickle of titillation, did not interest me more than any other book of fairy tales or myths. Yet there was my writing God. I knit him out of the darkness in my bedroom, slowly, over many nights, so that it seemed he had always been there. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t watching and recording. He belonged only to me, and the deal I made with him was that as long as he looked after my writing — helped me be a better writer, helped me publish and live my life as a writer — I would never ask him for anything else. The rest of my life could dissolve into heartbreaks and catastrophes, into a litany of losses, but as long as he made sure I was still writing and publishing, he was doing his job and I had no right to ask him for help in any other area.
As a child I thought every writer had such a deity, and I still remember the shock I felt reading about authors’ deaths in the newspaper, the unfinished books they had left behind. If they had been working on manuscripts, how could they succumb to mortal illness or accident? It was their duty to finish those books, it was why they has been put on this earth; they were no more than vehicles for their stories, and their writing gods should have seen that they lived — however miserably — to carry out their work. I believed that as long as I was working on a poem, a story, a book — over two summers, when i was nine and ten, I wrote two full-length novels, long lost — I could not die.”
