…but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.

Obviously, everything has always been defined by the dominant ideology. But the dominant ideology has been able to accept women's literature as well as men's literature. I would say that women have been hindered from creating for a variety of reasons, as Virginia Woolf so admirably explained in A Room of One's Own. When they have created, on the whole they have been recognized. In literature it hasn't been nearly as oppressive as in, say, painting, where even the existence of so many women painters has always been denied.

Literature in France seems to be undergoing a crisis now, and nothing comes immediately to mind.

For years I thought my work still lay ahead, and now I find it is behind me: there was no moment when it took place.

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.

I'm not against mothers. I am against the ideology which expects every woman to have children, and I'm against the circumstances under which mothers have to have their children.

No existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself.