"I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met."

"It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most."

"It's afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn't necessarily prove that you loved him."

"It's only women who are not really quite women at all, frivolous women who have no idea, who neglect repairs."

"I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate."

"In love there are no vacations. No such thing. Love has to be lived fully with its boredom and all that."

"The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can't help it - can't help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it."

"Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country."

"The best way to fill time is to waste it."

"Heterosexuality is dangerous. It tempts you to aim at a perfect duality of desire."

"You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable."

"Journalism without a moral position is impossible. Every journalist is a moralist. It's absolutely unavoidable."