[On why she admires some authors rather than others:] I t...

[On why she admires some authors rather than others:] I think too that I need a brazier of historical experience, a horizon of events, to sense a centre of political suffering, as is the case for Lispector, Akhmatova, Tsvetayeva, Bachmann. (Woolf doesn't lack this, but she comes from the same milieu as Proust, and within me there's a little Jewish girl who feels so removed from these social classes ...

[On the sense that her work has offspring among contemporary writers:] I think of this often, telling myself that my future library is already in place, I can hear the breath of works already formed, that will extend beyond my death, and for me, this is happiness, this adds life to my life. 'To have children' late in life is a wonderful experience! It made Sarah laugh and thrilled Abraham. It's miraculous. One wants to be proud but once can only be humble. For one is not the cause of these marvellous 'descendants', nor the condition, but only the first person, more or less, to see the great future approaching, at which one will not be present, but where one will be recollected, kept by a person in whom one is glad to be continued.

The proofs and their correction: there you touch upon a sore point: I have never dared to continue working at this stage. I feel it's utterly forbidden by editorial reprobation; I know how much it costs. Even when I correct minimally, I apologise profusely in the margins. I don't feel at home any more once the proofs arrive, I am a guest (same with the plays, as soon as rehearsals begin, I have no more rights).

[On titling her books:] ... since the title doesn't come along until after the book, coming from it, and sometimes very late [...], it escapes from the book like a sigh, a sigh of regret. Or a burst of laughter. The book could get along without it. Then it accepts the yoke, while trying to play with it to the limit. Shake it up. Then it submits to the judgement of God, which liberates it from its submission.

 [...] there will always be 'the two worlds' [...] once, hence, the dominant, the one which is now the globalizer; the other, the impure, the hounded out, the marginalised, the 'filthy' of the clean, and which is composed of people or classes considered, on the political level, as the 'damned' of the period; but - and this matters a great deal to me - also on the cultural level composed of the 'rich' in spirit, the intolerable, the poets, philosophers, seekers of the absolute, all those whose sources of delight are found at pretty inaccessible altitudes, who live on languages, and who have found Kleist's second innocence, who desired not power but the poem, and who are hated or feared because they are not aligned and don't conform to the spirit of imitation and predation.

... the time-detached, the dead outliving those who are the inhabitants of literature.

The Bible is everywhere and from the beginning and 'naturally' present in what I write, myths, themes, leitmotivs, songs, promised lands, philosophemes. I am 'at home' in it as in the desert and with God, that is with the need of and the lack of God.

Texts that are broken, fleeting, correspond surely also to urgencies of flight, caused by the pursuit of or dream of a subject which shimmers and sweeps me along but which can't and musn't be taken, grasped, captured.

I write 'a book' and this book lodges itself within me, a passerby, a guest, it exists in flesh and words; and I get to know this complex, composed but unique being, creature. I discover it as we go along. Its vital, animal part is very strong. Moroever it uses my body to make a body, members, for itself, to increase and divide itself into characters. As when I dream and people, at times complete strangers, populate me and I myself become a novel of a kind, in which I am myself a character who has heaps of adventures, and assault and battery.

from Helene Cixous, Frederic-Yves Jeannet, Encounters