Marguerite Duras

When a woman drinks it’s as if an animal were drinking, or a child. Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman, and a female alcoholic is rare, a serious matter. It’s a slur on the divine in our nature.

Men like women who write. Even though they don’t say so. A writer is a foreign country.

It’s afterwards you realize that the feeling of happiness you had with a man didn’t necessarily prove that you loved him.

Alcohol doesn’t console, it doesn’t fill up anyone’s psychological gaps, all it replaces is the lack of God. It doesn’t comfort man. On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly, it transports him to the supreme regions where he is master of his own destiny.

In love there are no vacations. No such thing. Love has to be lived fully with its boredom and all that.

You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they’re simply unbearable.

No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.

It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most.

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

I see journalists as the manual workers, the laborers of the word. Journalism can only be literature when it is passionate.

I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met.

Heterosexuality is dangerous. It tempts you to aim at a perfect duality of desire.

The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She can’t help it – can’t help trying to interest her nearest and dearest not in happiness itself but in the search for it.

It’s only women who are not really quite women at all, frivolous women who have no idea, who neglect repairs.

Alcohol is barren. The words a man speaks in the night of drunkenness fade like the darkness itself at the coming of day.

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