A woman has to demonstrate in every moment to be thirty times better than a man, to gain trust and to be considered. So, she has to be tenacious, combattative but not aggressive, she has to love her work a lot and not let herself be discouraged by the daily discriminiation she encounters.

Dacia Maraini

Categorized in : Men Gains Encounters

Friendship is a form of love. In fact, you don't know how it starts or why. It is subject to the caprices of time. It can grow or die without a reason. It can last a lifetime.

Dacia Maraini

lasts lifetime facts

Above all else she mustn't think that using her body will help her attain her goal. Men use women who play seductively, and then they look down on them.

Dacia Maraini

play men thinking

Characters simply come and find me. They sit down, I offer them a coffee. They tell me their story and then they almost always leave. When a character, after drinking some coffee and briefly telling her story, wants dinner and then a place to sleep and then breakfast and so on, for me the time has come to write the novel.

Dacia Maraini

coffee drinking writing

I don't always understand my characters. I write to understand them better.

Dacia Maraini

writing character

I dream of continuing to dream.

Dacia Maraini

continuing dream

While on the level of civil rights many things have changed decisively for the better, on the level of attitudes and mentality there's still a long way to go. On the other hand it's obvious that it's much easier to change a law than to change a way of thinking.

Dacia Maraini

rights attitude thinking

To leave a book is like leaving the better part of oneself.

Dacia Maraini

oneself leaving book

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.

Dacia Maraini

falling-in-love stories long

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.

Dacia Maraini

pain sea beach

The future is created through memory.

Dacia Maraini

memories

When I look around me, I see mostly women who are alone, left by their husbands after their kids grew up, for a younger woman, which is the most common thing, or suddenly abandoned after getting married and left with young children.

Dacia Maraini

husband kids children

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.

Dacia Maraini

liberty fiction ideas

What strikes me most of all in Christian culture, which is supposed to be concerned with the rights of the weakest, is the lack of regard toward animals. Maybe because they're thought to be soulless.

Dacia Maraini

rights christian animal

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.

Dacia Maraini

unhappy gone writing

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

Dacia Maraini

wave habit

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.

Dacia Maraini

mystery personality character

A painter's hand has a thirst for thieving, it steals from heaven and makes a gift to the memories of men, it feigns eternity and it delights in this pretence almost as if it had created rules of its own, more durable and more profoundly true.

Dacia Maraini

men memories art

Since the journey is a metaphor - the most ambiguous and seductive of metaphors, we tell ourselves - it can also be born of immobility. There is no need to drag our bodies around so much, all dressed up. It's hot, there are flies, diseases. It is enough to close our eyes, seated on a chair in the shade, to float on the waves of imagination. Isn't that what books are there for?

Dacia Maraini

eye journey book

Don't wait for success, but for the respect and interest of those who read you. At the start it could be a classmate, someone who shares your interests. Before sending off the manuscript for a novel to a publishing house, it would be a good idea to try writing short stories, and publishing them in a local magazine.

Dacia Maraini

publishing-house writing ideas

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

Dacia Maraini

sensitive injustice persons