Given masculine norms, it is clear that women are more likely to be considered crazy - I'm not saying to be crazy.

A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.

Every time a man dies, a child dies too, and an adolescent and a young man as well; everyone weeps for the one who was dear to him.

A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.

I was very fond of Lagneau’s phrase: “I have no comfort but in my absolute despair.

Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours.