How quickly people changed, with their interests, their feelings. Well-made phrases replaced by well-made phrases, time is a flow of words coherent only in appearance, the one who piles up the most is the one who wins.
The solitude of women’s minds is regrettable, I said to myself, it’s a waste to be separated from each other without procedures, without tradition.
Don’t be timid. You’re a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present. And begin with the scum in your area, put their backs to the wall.
Maybe I should tell her that things without meaning are the most beautiful ones. It’s a good sentence, she’ll like it.
Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite.
I doubt that work ennobles man and I am absolutely certain that it does not ennoble woman.
As a result of subduing the forces of nature with the tools that we invent, we find ourselves today at the point where the force of our tools has become a greater concern than the forces of nature.
Engineering -nature is engineering, so is culture, science is right behind, only chaos is not an engineer- and, along with it, the furious need to reproduce.
She, on the other hand, seized things, truly wanted them, was passionate about them, played for all or nothing, and wasn’t afraid of contempt, mockery, spitting, beatings.
Maybe we really are made of the same clay, maybe we really are condemned, blameless, to the same, identical mediocrity.
Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write.
Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote.
The hardest things to talk about are the ones we ourselves can’t understand.
What a complex foamy mixture a couple is. Even if the relationship shatters and ends, it continues to act in secret pathways, it doesn’t die, it doesn’t want to die.
…maybe, in the face of abandonment, we are all the same; maybe not even a very orderly mind can endure the discovery of not being loved.
I soon had to admit that what I did by myself couldn’t excite me, only what Lila touched became important.
Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.
Don’t be timid. You’re a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present.
I simply decided once and for all to liberate myself from the anxiety of notoriety and the urge to be a part of that circle of successful people, those who believe they have won who-knows-what
I’m lying, yes, but why do you force me to give a linear explanation; linear explanations are almost always lies.
The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.
Although she was fragile in appearance, every prohibition lost substance in her presence.
Religion will disappear from men’s consciousness when, finally, we have constructed a world of equals, without class distinctions, and with a sound of scientific conception of society and of life
Only when we feel the story in each of its moments or places are we able to tell it properly.
What’s got into me? Do I want children? Do I want to be a mamma, nursing and singing lullabies? Marriage plus pregnancy? And if my mother should emerge from my stomach just now when I think I’m safe?
I believe that, for those who love to write, time spent writing is never wasted. And then isn’t it from book to book that we approach the book that we really want to write?
There is this presumption, in those who feel destined for art and above all literature: we act as if we had received an investiture, but in fact no one has invested us with anything, it is we who have authorized ourselves to be authors.