Anais Nin Quotes

One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.

I kind of hate the fact that I feel like people expect you to announce what you are, and then you become it. I would rather become the thing and then name it.

The struggle to excavate your true, authentic self from beneath the mountain of conditioning and ridiculous expectation is the epic struggle of your lifetime.

All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself.

You’ve been assigned an identity since birth. Then you spend the rest of your life walking around in it to see if it really fits. You try on all these different selves and abandon just as many. But really it’s about dismantling all that false armor, getting down to what’s real. -Going Bovine

Becoming a woman is an act partly of nature and partly of self-invention.

I believed my story would be helpful to young women my daughter's age, who are still in the process of forming themselves as women, and in need of encouragement to remain true to themselves.

I'm not interested in nostalgia; I'm interested in who I am.

You have to be someone.

I begin to perceive that I am a woman. What that is, heaven knows... the philosophy is yet to be written, there is a world to be explored.

When you know who you are, you know who you are. That's the real dangerous thing in Hollywood, because they all want to create you and mold you.

I look back at old photographs and videotapes, and I go, Who was I trying to be? Who was I doing this for?

If you have to change something about you to be in a part, I don't think it's easy to do. You should just pick the part where you can just be yourself.

All that I am is me. So I'm not really a poet or a writer or an actor or an activist; I'm me, and these are things that I do.

I'm still very much Kate.

I have to live in the truth that this is who I am. That's what I need to focus on.

Transcendence constitutes selfhood.

No matter how widely spread out the films are, how different, you still are you.

I was raised to sense what someone wanted me to be and be that kind of person. It took me a long time not to judge myself through someone else's eyes.

Yeah, it's nice to look up to people, but the more you try to be somebody else, the less you are of yourself.

The first half of life is spent mainly in finding out who we are through seeing ourselves in our interaction with others.

College was just so essential for my sense of self and my development.

I feel like you come in under a cloak of someone else's skin for a while, but then you can shrug it off - you have to find your own voice, if you want to keep doing it. That became a really conscious thing for me.

I spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley's son.

Never think you can separate who you are from what you're doing.