54 Quotes by Leïla Slimani

The baby is dead.

I love cooking shows! I'm not a bad cook myself, but I must say that I admire the creativity of those young chefs. It makes me jealous... and hungry.

You want your children to love the nanny, but at the same time, you want to stay the mother, and you want to be the most-loved. So there is a sort of jealousy between the mother and the nanny.

I want to say that I can be Moroccan and speak about someone without speaking about his nationality. Because, you know, I have the feeling that when you come from Morocco, when you come from Afghanistan, when you come from Africa, Occidental people always wait for you to write a novel about identity.

Let's stop hiding behind a pseudo-respect of cultures, in a sickening relativism that's only a mask for our cowardice, our cynicism, and our powerlessness. I, born Muslim, Moroccan, and French, I will say it to you: Sharia makes me vomit.

You have to fight against all the things that will keep you out of writing, because life doesn't go with writing. You will always have something more important to do: you will have to take your children to school, you will have to cook something, you have to meet friends. But you have to fight if you want to write.

I am not patriotic or nationalistic, but the French language is like a country where I take refuge when I have nowhere else to go. It consoles me for everything. For me, the language no longer belongs to the colonialists.

That animal part of us, it's the most interesting part. It's everything that has to do with drives, with things we can't stop ourselves from doing, with all the spaces where we're unable to reason with ourselves. It has its dark side, but there's a luminous side, too, which is the fact that we're just another species of animal.

All fiction is based on truth - 'Madame Bovary' is based on a true story!