Marguerite Duras

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

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

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.

The house a woman creates is a Utopia. She cant help it cant 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 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.

For that's what a woman, a mother wants _ to teach her children to take an interest in life. She knows it's safer for them to be interested in other people's happiness than to believe in their own.

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

In homosexual love the passion is homosexuality itself. What a homosexual loves as if it were his lover his country his art his land is homosexuality.

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

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.

Fidelity enforced and unto death is the price you pay for the kind of love you never want to give up for someone you want to hold forever tighter and tighter whether hes close or far away someone who becomes dearer to you the more youve sacrificed for his sake.

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

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

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.

People come to Paris, to the capital, to give their lives a sense of belonging, of an almost mythical participation in society.

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

The best way to fill time is to waste it.

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.

The thing thats between us is fascination and the fascination resides in our being alike. Whether youre a man or a woman the fascination resides in finding out that were alike.

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

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