Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody.

The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.

A man of the right doesn't write in the same way as a man of the left, you can see that right away, or a woman of the right or a woman of the left.

A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into?

I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.

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.

Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.