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

Women should not let lovers read the books they write.

Perhaps you’ll escape. Day and night, this obsession. It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.

You didn’t have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn’t exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been.

One must talk. That’s how it is. One must.

My memory of men is never lit up and illuminated like my memory of women.

I answered that what I wanted more than anything else in the world was to write, nothing else but that, nothing. Jealous. She’s jealous. No answer, just a quick glance immediately averted, a slight shrug, unforgettable. I’ll be the first to leave. There are still a few years to wait before she loses me, loses this one of her children. For the sons there’s nothing to fear. But this one, she knows, one day she’ll go, she’ll manage to escape.

And then, one day, my love, you come out of eternity.

We tell each other things that have no relation to the afternoon’s events or the coming night but that relate to God, to his absence that is so present, like the breasts of the young girl, so young before the immensity of what is to come.

In heterosexual love there’s no solution. Man and woman are irreconcilable, and it’s the doomed attempt to do the impossible, repeated in each new affair, that lends heterosexual love its grandeur.