I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.

To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.

Man is a talking animal and he will always let himself be swayed by the power of the word. Machines won't change human nature.

To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity.

Can one say that there is a way of crying out, of speaking, which is properly feminine? Personally, I don't think so. In the end, I find this is another way of putting women in a kind of singularity, a ghetto, which is not what I want. I want them to be singular and universal at the same time.

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

To lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.