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.

Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside --from others. We do not accept it willingly.

I think there is a great tendency toward autobiography among women today. It is perhaps facile - and I say that even though I have written one myself.

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.

We can reorient science - for example, a kind of medicine much more directed toward the enormous number of women's health problems which are neglected now. But the original givens of this science are the same for men and for women. Women simply have to steal the instrument; they don't have to break it, or try, a priori, to make of it something totally different. Steal it and use it for their own good.

Sign of old age: distress at all leave-takings, all separations. And the sadness of memories, because I'm aware they're condemned to death.

To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.