Sometimes you can accept an important post, on condition that it really puts you in a position to help women. Unfortunately, women who have important posts very often adopt masculine standards-power, ambition, personal success - and cut themselves off from other women.

If the writer is a woman, feminist or not, it will give the language something that it would not have if it had been used by a man.

Love and action always imply a failure, but this failure must not keep us from loving and acting. For we have not only to establish what our situation is, we have to choose it in the very heart of its ambiguity.

Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.

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

I believe that we must use language. If it is used in a feminist perspective, with a feminist sensibility, language will find itself changed in a feminist manner. It will nonetheless be the language. You can't not use this universal instrument; you can't create an artificial language, in my opinion. But naturally, each writer must use it in his/her own way.

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