There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost...I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself!

Writing is a trade ... which is learned by writing.

Literature in France seems to be undergoing a crisis now, and nothing comes immediately to mind.

Old age is better for women than for men. First of all, they have less far to fall, since their lives are more mediocre than those of most men.

The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it.

We can reorient science - for example, a kind of medicine much more directed toward the enormous number of women's health problems which are neglected now. But the original givens of this science are the same for men and for women. Women simply have to steal the instrument; they don't have to break it, or try, a priori, to make of it something totally different. Steal it and use it for their own good.

I went to get a detective story. You have to kill time. But time will kill me too - and there´s the true, preestablished balance.