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.

...as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened.

It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn't necessarily prove that you loved him.

The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.

In heterosexual love there's no solution. Man and woman are irreconcilable, and it's the doomed attempt to do the impossible, repeated in each new affair, that lends heterosexual love its grandeur.

Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.

I have never waited for anything the way I've waited for today, when nothing will happen.