He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies!

I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.

Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.

We always come back to the same vicious circle - an extreme degree of material or intellectual poverty does away with the means of alleviating it.

There are jobs that can be done equally well by men or by women and that finally you can't see a difference. But from the moment that you involve yourself fully in writing a novel, for example, or an essay, then you are involved as a woman, in the same way that you can't deny your nationality - you are French, you are a man, you are a woman... all this passes into the writing.

When Goya was 80 he drew an ancient man propped on two sticks, with a great mass of white hair and beard all over his face, and the inscription, "I am still learning."

This is certainly a very tricky point: How to ally yourself to other leftist forces without losing your feminist specificity.