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

Women have been burnt as witches simply because they were beautiful.

To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.

In every society the artist or writer remains an outsider.

If you are writing something in which you are really involved, you don't even need to think about it any longer. The situation itself demands your total commitment as an individual, just as in your political commitments.

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.

I take on a shape and an existence only if I first throw myself into the world by loving, by doing.