“Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.”

When she raises her eyelids it’s as if she were taking off all her clothes.

There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.

Time spent with a cat is never wasted.

By an image we hold on to our lost treasures, but it is the wrenching loss that forms the image, composes, binds the bouquet.

A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man. An intelligent woman gives up.

You do not notice changes in what is always before you.

Sincerity is not a spontaneous flower nor is modesty either.

Hope costs nothing.

In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.

There are no ordinary cats.

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

I want nothing from love, in short, but love.

If I can’t have too many truffles, I’ll do without truffles.

I went to collect the few personal belongings which. I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.

My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved.

You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.

I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.

I’m male gigolo. Professionally? I don’t think I’ve ever done anything professionally.

if we are unaware that women even have a history–we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.

Pakistani feature films are all about catering to the male ego and male fantasy.

If, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens.

The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics.

We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn’t themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too “political,” “merely” oral and thus unreliable.

The revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.