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

Woman has always been man's dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.

A life is such a strange object, at one moment translucent, at another utterly opaque, an object I make with my own hands, an object imposed on me, an object for which the world provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered, broken, scored yet retaining its unity; how heavy it is and how inconsistent: this contradiction breeds many misunderstandings.

The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.

It's true that this is one of the problems which often arises among my radical, revolutionary feminist friends: Do you have to join the system or not? On the one hand, if you don't, you risk being ineffectual. But if you do, from that moment on, you place your feminism at the service of a system which you want to take apart.

There is only one good. And that is to act according to the dictates of one's conscience.

The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams.