I think it's wrong to write in a totally esoteric language when you want to talk about things which interest a multitude of women.

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.

He formed his sentences hesitantly and then threw them at me with such force that I felt as if I were receiving a present each time

I admire Freud a great deal as a person and thinker. Despite everything, I find his work very, very rich, but I think that for women he has been absolutely disastrous. And even more so, everyone who came after him.

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

There is something false in this search for a purely feminine writing style. Language, such as it is, is inherited from a masculine society, and it contains many male prejudices. We must rid language of all that. Still, a language is not something created artificially; the proletariat can't use a different language from the bourgeoisie, even if they use it differently, even if from time to time they invent something, technical words or even a kind of worker's slang, which can be very beautiful and very rich. Women can do that as well, enrich their language, clean it up.

The torment that so many young women know, bound hand and foot by love and motherhood, without having forgotten their former dreams.