Old age is better for women than for men. First of all, they have less far to fall, since their lives are more mediocre than those of most men.

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

To give space when what one most yearns for is closeness, that is both the great test and great tragedy of love.

In 1949, I believed that social progress, the triumph of the proletariat, socialism would lead to the emancipation of women. But I saw that nothing came of it: first of all, that socialism was not achieved anywhere, and that in certain countries which called themselves socialist, the situation of women was no better than it was in so-called capitalist countries.

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.

To refuse everything, to say, even when there is something which really should be done, "Ah, that's no longer feminist," is a pessimistic, even masochistic tendency in women, the result of having been habituated to inertia, to pessimism.

Literature is always what the dominant ideology recognizes as literature.