Nothing endures unless it has first been transposed into a myth, and the great advantage of myths is that they are ladies with portable roots.

I love man as creator, lover, husband, friend, but man the father I do not trust. I do not believe in man as father. I do not trust man as father.

Out of the red and silver and the long cry of alarm to the poet who survives in all human beings, as the child survives in him; to this poet she threw an unexpected ladder in the middle of the city and ordained, 'Climb!

Pain is something to master, not to wallow in.

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.

For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue — that I had to do the job myself.

Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home.