Eroticism has its own moral justification because it says that pleasure is enough for me; it is a statement of the individual's sovereignty.

No democracy is born perfect, and none ever gets to be perfect. Yet democracy is superior to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes because, unlike them, democracy is perfectible.

Memory is a snare, pure and simple; it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present.

A good novel is a conjunction of many factors, the main of which is without a doubt, hard work.

Science is still only a candle glimmering in a great pitch-dark cavern.

This fact was something I also learned from this first novel that I needed personal experience to invent, to fantasize, to create fiction, but at the same time I needed some distance, some perspective on this experience in order to feel free enough to manipulate it and to transform it into fiction. If the experience is very close, I feel inhibited. I have never been able to write fiction about something that has happened to me recently. If the closeness of the real reality, of living reality, is to have a persuasive effect on my imagination, I need a distance, a distance in time and in space.

I convinced her that her first loyalty isn't to other people, but to her own feelings.