“Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.”

Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.

Death itself does not frighten me; it is the jump I am afraid of.

The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project.

Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.

That the child is the supreme aim of woman is a statement having precisely the value of an advertising slogan.

Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you’ve lost that, you’ve lost everything.

You said something very true the other day: that for us, nudity begins with the face.

But it is impossible for anyone to say ‘I am sacrificing myself’ without feeling bitterness.

There’s something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.

Weakness’ is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal and the laws he imposes.

I enjoyed my exhaustion, though; I liked overdoing things.

Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.

If you point out that they’re walking in shit they scream it’s you that have dirty feet.

If so few female geniuses are found in history, it is because society denies them any means of expression.

All success cloaks a surrender.

Girls are weighed down by restrictions, boys with demands – two equally harmful disciplines.

Though my father was Norwegian, he always wrote his diaries in perfect English.

It’s not the men in your life that matters, it’s the life in your men.

With my kids, they’re told 75 times a day that they’re loved.

Even when I was rebelling against my father, the point was to follow my own intuition and instinct.

It’s natural that anyone is compared to their father.

As a father you need to do everything, be it playing games with your kids, gyming with them, or for that matter cutting their hair.

I was glad my father was an eye-smiler. It meant he never gave me a fake smile because it’s impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren’t feeling twinkly yourself.

My father used to say that it’s never too late to do anything you wanted to do. And he said, ‘You never know what you can accomplish until you try.