I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.

You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see, and you will be that, the unknown part of me, until I die.

The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.

I know all one can know when one knows nothing.

I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.

When a woman drinks it's as if an animal were drinking, or a child. Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman, and a female alcoholic is rare, a serious matter. It's a slur on the divine in our nature.

A woman's work, from the time she gets up to the time she goes to bed, is as hard as a day at war, worse than a man's working day. ... To men, women's work was like the rain-bringing clouds, or the rain itself. The task involved was carried out every day as regularly as sleep. So men were happy - men in the Middle Ages, men at the time of the Revolution, and men in 1986: everything in the garden was lovely.