"I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing."

"I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension."

"If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness.  For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience and creation."

"Literature is an exaggeration, a dramatization, and those who are nourished on it (as I was) are in great danger of trying to approximate an impossible rhythm.  Trying to live up to Dostoevskian scenes every day."

"Writing now shows the pains of childbearing.  No joy.  Just pain, sweat, exhaustion.  It saps the blood.  It is a curse.  Real throes.  No one knows this but the true writer...What a grip on one's soul, one's guts, everything."

"Man can never know the kind of loneliness a woman knows.  Man lies in a woman's womb only to gather strength...and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art.  He is not lonely.  He is busy...Man lies in [a woman's] womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE."

"Ordinary life does not interest me.  I seek only the high moments.  I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous."

"The territory of woman is that which lies untouched by the direct desire of man.  Man attacks the vital center.  Woman fills out the circumference."

All of the above excerpts belong to Anais Nin.