Habit has a kind of poetry.

Christian ideology has contributed no little to the oppression of woman.

No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.

I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe.

I have never read a really good novel written by a man where women are portrayed as they truly are. They can be portrayed externally very well - Stendhal's Madame de Renal, for example - but only as seen from the outside.

What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.

There are jobs that can be done equally well by men or by women and that finally you can't see a difference. But from the moment that you involve yourself fully in writing a novel, for example, or an essay, then you are involved as a woman, in the same way that you can't deny your nationality - you are French, you are a man, you are a woman... all this passes into the writing.