In order not to cut out a large part of one's private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing.

I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.

The fictional treatment of biographical material - a treatment that for me is essential - is full of traps.

Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.

There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable. The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.

It's the people who love us or hate us - or both - who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.

The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.