Characters simply come and find me. They sit down, I offer them a coffee. They tell me their story and then they almost always leave. When a character, after drinking some coffee and briefly telling her story, wants dinner and then a place to sleep and then breakfast and so on, for me the time has come to write the novel.

Adults don't know how to respect and really love their young ones. Often love is confused with possession. You say "this is my" about your child, without taking into account that you're dealing with a real person with his/her own personality, rights, and autonomy, even when very young.

There are still countries where women don't enjoy basic rights like the vote or the freedom to study or the freedom of choice in marriage. Every year there are twenty million little girls in Africa who are deprived of their sexuality through brutal genital operations. Basically, there's still much to be done.

For my whole life I have dedicated myself to those who have been subjected to injustice. I've conducted investigations and written in newspapers about the homeless, the incarcerated, the sick excluded from care, about child labor, child exploitation, etc.

I consider myself an aware person who is sensitive to injustice.

A woman has to demonstrate in every moment to be thirty times better than a man, to gain trust and to be considered. So, she has to be tenacious, combattative but not aggressive, she has to love her work a lot and not let herself be discouraged by the daily discriminiation she encounters.

A painter's hand has a thirst for thieving, it steals from heaven and makes a gift to the memories of men, it feigns eternity and it delights in this pretence almost as if it had created rules of its own, more durable and more profoundly true.