Perhaps Lila was right: my book—even though it was having so much success—really was bad, and this was because it was well organized, because it was written with obsessive care, because I hadn’t been able to imitate the disjointed, unaesthetic, illogical, shapeless banality of things.

On the page was exactly what I had written, but it was clearer, more immediate. The erasures, the transpositions, the small additions, and, in some way, her handwriting itself gave me the impression that I had escaped from myself and now was running a hundred paces ahead with an energy and also a harmony that the person left behind didn't know she had.

I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages.

Yes, it's Lila who makes writing difficult. My life forces me to imagine what hers would have been if what happened to me had happened to her, what use she would have made of my luck.

I was secretly convinced that I would truly exist only at the moment when my signature, Elena Greco, appeared in print...

I simply decided once and for all to liberate myself from the anxiety of notoriety and the urge to be a part of that circle of successful people, those who believe they have won who-knows-what

Languages for me have a secret venom that every so often foams up and for which there is no antidote.

Don't be timid. You're a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present.

I believe that, for those who love to write, time spent writing is never wasted. And then isn't it from book to book that we approach the book that we really want to write?