from one minute to the next the present is merely an honorary past. It must be filled unceasingly anew to dissemble the curse it carries within itself; that is why Americans like speed, alcohol, thriller films and any sensational news: the demand for new things, and ever newer things, is feverish since nowhere will they rest.

To refuse everything, to say, even when there is something which really should be done, "Ah, that's no longer feminist," is a pessimistic, even masochistic tendency in women, the result of having been habituated to inertia, to pessimism.

Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me.

Literature is born when something in life goes slightly adrift.

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

In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider.