ss In an early interview with Henri Quéré, you say that for you the spoken word is secondary to the written word. And yet it seems to me that in your interviews — of which you've done many over the course of your career — you often take a great deal of pleasure in the possibilities of the spoken word. There is a sense, in your interviews, that the spoken word can transport in the way you suggest writing transports us in our thinking and understanding. Reading through your interviews, I am also struck that you frequently put things differently to the way you put them in your writing. Do you still feel that the spoken word is secondary to the written word? How do you view your interviews?

cixous I feel I'm not an artist when I write orally, which is obvious because you can't be equivocal — or at least I can't — when you speak. The indirectness, the obliquity of writing, the multiplicity — of layers of signifiers etc. — is almost excluded from the act of writing orally. Why do I say writing orally? Because it is writing. It's simpler, thinner — a threadlike writing. I don't reject the idea of it, but I know it's less illuminated, less inspired. Even the circumstances are less favourable.