Jeremy > Jeremy's Quotes

“Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.”
― Lao Tzu

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that
without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”
― Pearl S. Buck

“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

“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

“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

“With the use of drugs people became passive, uncreative tourists in the world of images.”
― 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

“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 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

“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

“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