Q. What are you working on now?A. Just a text. It can't...

Q. What are you working on now?

A. Just a text. It can't be called anything else [she is referring to L'Amour - LI]. And in a very mathematical way, a little like Abahn. One could say that the text is pure imbecility. I have ceased to understand what I am writing. When a certain music is present, I know that the text is progressing. When the music stops, I stop. When it begins again, I begin again.

[...]

I don't see how one cannot be a writer (I mean in the broad sense of the term). I know all kinds of people who don't write and are writers. By that I mean that the world passes to us by way of them. They hand it on; they don't just endure it. There are many people who write and who are much farther from being writers than people who don't. One can write very well without the blank page.

[...]

Destroy is an area from which sleep has disappeared. As a consequence, dreams have disappeared, dreams that compensate ...

[...]

For a long time, I held for the absolute noncommitment of the writer; now I hold that it is madness and a lie to say that the writer is not committed. A writer commits himself from the very moment he picks up the pen. Revolutionary demands and literary demands are one and the same.

Q. One doesn't destroy the other?

A. They blend. If there is a divorce between the two, there is no longer any composition. There is an absurd mechanical activity which isn't based on anything.

Duras, interviewed by Germain Bree (1972)