Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell[a] (… February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977) was a French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica. Born to Cuban parents in France, Nin was the daughter of the composer Joaquín Nin and the classically trained singer Rosa Culmell. Nin spent her early years in Spain and Cuba, about sixteen years in Paris (1924–1940), and the remaining half of her life in the United States, where she became an established author.

…In addition to her journals, Nin wrote several novels, critical studies, essays, short stories, and volumes of erotic literature. Much of her work, including the collections of erotica Delta of Venus and Little Birds, was published posthumously amid renewed critical interest in her life and work. Nin spent her later life in Los Angeles, California, where she died of cervical cancer in 1977. She was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976.

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

“I write emotional algebra.”

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

“...for no one has ever loved an adventurous woman as they have loved adventurous men.”

“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”

“He was now in that state of fire that she loved. She wanted to be burnt.”“I reserve the right to love many different people at once, and to change my prince often.”“To think of him in the middle of the day lifts me out of ordinary living.”
“What I cannot love, I overlook.”
“Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s. ”
“The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.”

“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.”
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.”
“I hate men who are afraid of women's strength.”
“Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.”
“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
“She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.”

“We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.”
“What can I do with my happiness? How can I keep it, conceal it, bury it where I may never lose it? I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, gather it up with lace and silk, and press it over myself again.”

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”