It's only arrogance if you're wrong.

Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.

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

there is a poetry in making preserves; the housewife has caught duration in the snare of sugar, she has enclosed life in jars.

You can't define the future. And in my opinion, you can't define the avant-garde.

Feminism is a revolutionary movement which is different from the class struggle movement, the proletarian movement, but which is a movement which must be leftist. By that I mean at the extreme left, a movement working to overthrow the whole society.

Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people.