Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

You know that you can't make references to the Classics any longer and less and less to the English classics even.

I have been told that I am a "natural" feminist, someone who was born a feminist. In fact I was quite blind to what the problem was: I couldn't understand why anyone would hesitate to do what they wanted to do just because they were told that women didn't do such things.

Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).

We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.

One of the author's most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith.

My emotional life: dialectic between craving for privacy and need to submerge myself in a passionate relationship to another.