What I leave out of my work I leave out, discard, and overlook in life as well, because I do not think it is important. It weighs people down, and kills vision and spiritual perceptions. Too much upholstery. We are limited enough as it is without weighing ourselves down with facts which do not inspire, nourish, or liberate us. […] America suffers from too much realism, too much Dreiserism, too many Hemingways and Thomas Wolfes. My passion is for freedom from contingencies, from statistics, from literalness, from photographic descriptions.
–The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume Four
Echoing Breton grousing (in his Surrealist Manifesto) about descriptions of wallpaper in Dostoevsky. This volume has her struggling with being a prose stylist – she was only recognized by poets, they understood, but major publishing houses wanted her to be more like Steinbeck. She refused. I should give her fiction another chance, as I feel rather the same way about it. Her “Hemingways and Thomas Wolfes” could be replaced with “Updikes and Franzens”… Less upholstery = Lydia Davis, Grace Paley…