immortality is a terrible curse.

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.

The arrogance of some Christians would close heaven to them if, to their misfortune, it existed.

Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.

To be a woman, if not a defect, is at least a peculiarity.

Every time I start on a new book, I am a beginner again. I doubt myself, I grow discouraged, all the work accomplished in the past is as though it never was, my first drafts are so shapeless that it seems impossible to go on with the attempt at all, right up until the moment - always imperceptible, there, too, there is a break - when it is has become impossible not to finish it.

A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself.