Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.

Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility.

This has always been a man's world, and none of the reasons that have been offered in explanation have seemed adequate.

I had never believed in the sacred nature of literature. God had died when I was fourteen.

Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious, it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries; what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom.

There are moments when you have to write certain things and you don't have to think of your sex. If you are writing about the population of the thirteenth district in Paris, even if you are writing on the women in the thirteenth district, there's no need to consider your sex.

In order to be an artist, one must be deeply rooted in the society.