… I know hippies, kids well. My son is a sort of kid too. There is an almost irrepressible repulsion against knowledge and culture. They don't read anything. This is something fundamental, something entirely new.

[…] This is what young people are doing, you know. On the international level they are creating a void. […] they don't do anything. They excel at not doing anything. Getting to that point is fantastic. Do you know how not to do anything at all? I don't. This is what we lack most … They create a void, and all this … this recourse to drugs, I think is a … it's not an alibi, it's a means. I'm certain of that. Do you think so too? They're creating a vacuum, but we can't yet see what is going to replace what was destroyed in them – it's much too early for that.

[…] even if they're not politically aware, they nonetheless represent a political force. […] they represent a question, a question that weighs as heavily as a mountain: What now? […] by definition they are outside of the circuit of production. The hippie is a creature who has absolutely no ties with anything. […] it's not a rejection; it's a waiting period. Like someone taking his time. Before committing himself to act.

[…] There's a gap between hope and despair, if you will. Where it's both together. A gap that can't be described yet. I think it escapes description. It is what I call the void, the zero point. Perhaps the word 'void' is going too far … the zero point. The neutral point. Where sensitivity regroups, if you will, and rediscovers itself …

[she goes on to give the example of the Cultural Revolution ('a great mystico-communist experiment') as striving for exactly this 'zero point'.]

Anyway: it is said that there are more and more disturbed people. Madmen: mental institutions everywhere are full of them. This to me is profoundly reassuring. It clearly proves that the world is intolerable and that people feel it to be so. It merely proves that people's sensitivity is increasing. And intelligence … Do you see?

[…] I hope that there will be more and more madmen: I make this statement with pleasure, with satisfaction. Personally. It proves that the solution is near. The premises of a solution.

Duras, interviewed in 1969 in Cahiers du cinema