I don't always understand my characters. I write to understand them better.

I also really loved the sea when I was young, when I lived in Sicily, but unfortunately the sea here has been reduced to a trash dump. It's a horrible pain going to the beach; you risk getting an infection or getting tar all over you.

The future is created through memory.

Above all else she mustn't think that using her body will help her attain her goal. Men use women who play seductively, and then they look down on them.

Besides, everywhere, life is getting longer, marriages fall apart, divorce is a reality that happens even where the law doesn't sanction it. It remains the tradition that women are trusted to take care of the children.

When I look around me, I see mostly women who are alone, left by their husbands after their kids grew up, for a younger woman, which is the most common thing, or suddenly abandoned after getting married and left with young children.

Something struck me in Africa, in black Africa, where polygamy is legal: the solitary woman is the rule there, from at an extremely young age, and the children are always the mother's responsibility.