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.

The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.

In order to be an artist, one must be deeply rooted in the society.

Virginia Woolf thought a lot about her own sex when she wrote. In the best sense of the word, her writing is very feminine, and by that I mean that women are supposed to be very sensitive to all the sensations of nature, much more so than men, much more contemplative. It's this quality that marks her best works.

Woman is determined not by her hormones or by mysterious instincts, but by the manner in which her body and her relation to the world are modified through the action of others than herself.

In fact, people seem to be tired of fiction now. There are so many other ways of exploring humanity - by ethnology, psychoanalysis, and so on. It's a little boring to make up stories. So many people think that it's better to be very close to reality and to recount one's life as it is rather than to fictionalize, as they say, that is to transpose, and therefore to cheat.

I never thought of myself as being in the avant-garde. I said what I had to say, as I was able to say it.