To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.

If you haven't been happy very young, you can still be happy later on, but it's much harder. You need more luck.

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. The housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present … Eating, sleeping, cleaning – the years no longer rise up towards heaven, they lie spread out ahead, grey and identical. The battle against dust and dirt is never won.

The human species is forever in a state of change, forever becoming.

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.

It's so easy to be mistaken about the future. Sometimes there are avant-gardes which believe themselves to be the avant-garde and which later find themselves to be absolutely dated.

I discovered feminism around 1970-72-precisely the time when feminism began to exist in France. Before that, there was no feminism.