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

I willingly trust myself to chance. I let my thoughts wander, I digress, not only sitting at my work, but all day long, all night even. It often happens that a sentence suddenly runs through my head before I go to bed, or when I am unable to sleep, and I get up again and write it down.

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

As soon as a woman re- fuses to be perfectly happy doing housework eight hours a day, society has a tendency to want to do a lobotomy on her.

There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem.

The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.

Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.