It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.

I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.

it is true that nothing is gained without something being lost: everyone knows that in fulfilling oneself one necessarily sacrifices some possibilities.

In fact, people seem to be tired of fiction now. There are so many other ways of exploring humanity - by ethnology, psychoanalysis, and so on. It's a little boring to make up stories. So many people think that it's better to be very close to reality and to recount one's life as it is rather than to fictionalize, as they say, that is to transpose, and therefore to cheat.

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.

She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust.

No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.