MD: I know that when I write there is something inside me...

MD: I know that when I write there is something inside me that stops functioning, something that becomes silent. I let something take over inside me that probably flows from femininity. But everything shuts off - the analytic way of thinking, thinking inculcated by college, studies, reading, experience. I'm absolutely sure of what I'm telling you n ow. It's as if I were returning to a wild country. Nothing is concerted. perhaps, before everything else, before being Duras, I am - simply - a woman.

[...]

SHK: So you think women have not used their intelligence.

MD: Or their silence. The silence in women is such that anything that falls into it has an enormous reverberation. Whereas in men, this silence no longer exists.

Duras, interviewed by Susan Husserl-Kapit (1975)