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

That a whole part of the middle class detests me... is utterly normal. I would be troubled if the contrary were true.

If you try consciously to be avant-garde, it's a little dangerous, like the present state of modern painting, where dealers try to be avant-garde, and under this pretext, painters take some old scraps and call it avant-garde.

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

I was struck by the absence, even among very young boys and girls, of any interior motivation; they were incapable of thinking, of inventing, of imagining, of choosing, of deciding for themselves; this incapacity was expressed by their conformism; in every domain of life they employed only the abstract measure of money, because they were unable to trust to their own judgment.

One can hardly tell women that washing up saucepans is their divine mission, [so] they are told that bringing up children is their divine mission. But the way things are in the world, bringing up children has a great deal in common with washing up saucepans.

Literature in France seems to be undergoing a crisis now, and nothing comes immediately to mind.