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

Falling in love with a story is like falling in love with a person. It tends to occupy your life, your thoughts. You can't do anything else for a long time.

Success is something you should never take into consideration: if you follow it it'll elude you. It's important to really love your work as a writer, to read loads to the point where you can recognise blindfolded, hearing them read, the writers of yesterday and today. It's important to write every day, for hours. To have faith in your imagination and let it wander.

In a novel there's not much autobiography. There are characters in transit. Naturally, I can project something of my experiences onto the characters, but they have their own autonomy, a personality that is often a mystery to me.

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.

Aging has brought me greater liberty in fiction. When I was young I was harder on myself. I wrote with an idea of absolute seriousness.

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.