“I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.”

I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic – if we can call it that – between high and low. Maybe it’s because I was not born or brought up in affluence.

The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.

Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.

Even as I felt myself solidly contained by the expectant looks of my children. It was the fault of the torture that my husband had inflicted. But enough, I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain.

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.

In order not to cut out a large part of one’s private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing.

The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.

I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.

I had to discover very quickly that class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder.

Certainly something had happened to me during the night. Or after months of tension I had arrived at the edge of some precipice and now I was falling, as in a dream slowly, even as I continued to hold the thermometer in my hand, een as I stood with the soles of my slippers on the floor.

I don’t have any special passion for politics, it being a never-ending merry-go-round of bosses big and small, all generally mediocre. I actually find it boring.

My work stops at publication. If the books don’t contain in themselves their reasons for being – questions and answers – it means I was wrong to have them published.

Competition between women is good only if it does not prevail; that is to say if it coexists with affinity, affection, with a real sense of being mutually indispensable, with sudden peaks of solidarity in spite of envy, jealousy and the whole inevitable cohort of bad feelings.

Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.

Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.

Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.

The anonymity of the city is one of its strengths as well as – carried too far – one of its weaknesses.

I can never be anonymous – especially when I walk round looking like this; especially when I take so much trouble not to be anonymous, right?

By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.

The challenge for me as an actor is if you become a celebrity, you don’t meet strangers anymore. And strangers are where we have our anonymity. And I believe it’s essential for the soul to be anonymous, especially if you’re going to be an actor.

Anonymity beats fame. One cannot undo fame.

I think everybody really responds to the secret society aspect. This idea that you have to remain anonymous, and yet at the same time, you’re kind of saving the world.

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.

Overall I enjoy a certain anonymity. I live a very normal, very ordinary life.