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.

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.

One writes what one lives, even if not in a literal way. Someone who has gone through an unhappy love tends to describe unhappy loves, even if they have nothing to do with their own.

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.

He talked and talked because he didn't know what to say.

The waves have the habit of going forward and then flowing back.

A winter without snow seems depressing, lacking.