Tragedies are all right for a while: you are concerned, you are curious, you feel good. And then it gets repetitive, it doesn't advance, it grows dreadfully boring: it is so very boring, even for me.

The American woman's inequality with men is proved by her defiant attitude.

For years I thought my work still lay ahead, and now I find it is behind me: there was no moment when it took place.

A foreign country can best be understood through its literature.

History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.

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.

all success cloaks a surrender