If the writer is a woman, feminist or not, it will give the language something that it would not have if it had been used by a man.

Picasso never thought of himself as avant-garde. I just find it a bad way to think of yourself.

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.

Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.

The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy...It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present.

Writing ... is a profession that can only be learned by writing.

immortality is a terrible curse.