Marguerite Duras

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The best way to fill time is to waste it.