Leila Slimani

“I remember that the first time I looked at my son, of course I felt love. But I think the first feeling was not love: it was fear. Someone is needing me. If something happens to him, what am I going to do? Maybe I won't survive if something happens to him? The fear was as big as the love.”

“In Morocco, there is an insistence on authority. Children are not encouraged to speak up in front of their parents. My parents were not like this. I was the kind of girl who could tell her father, 'No, what you are saying is totally untrue, and I don't agree with you.'”

“One of the big mistakes of the Moroccan elite and the elite in the Muslim world was to be afraid of the conservatives. They are fighting for their ideas. Why shouldn't we fight for our ideas?”

“Human darkness fascinates me; I find it intriguing. And there are few female characters who are explored in this light.”

“Motherhood is not only something very pure and very full of love, it can be full of dark things, too.”

“I had a nanny growing up in Morocco, and my parents encouraged me to put myself in her shoes sometimes.”

“The only way you can know someone is through their actions - you can never know what's going on inside them.”

“I like to describe my characters as though they were all trapped in a glass box.”

“When you become a 'public person,' I find it very difficult to keep following social media. It is too harsh, too violent. I only read newspapers online.”

“I just don't believe that a woman is naturally closer to her child than a man. Not at all.”

“Everyone asks me, 'Why do you choose such subversive or shocking themes?' but when I'm alone in my office, I'm not like, 'OK I'm going to shock.' I want to write about a character who fascinates me, someone who I don't understand.”

“When I was a little girl and people would ask me what I wanted to be when I got older, I always used to say I want to be paid to think. So for me, to dream, to think, to write - it is wonderful.”

“I, too, am interested in identity and Islam, which is what people expect of us. But one must not write what is expected. It's important for North African writers to show they have other things to say.”

“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.”

“People don't want to treat their nannies subserviently. They don't want to act like bosses. And so nobody quite knows how to behave, and everyone is slightly pretending that the mother and nanny are 'equal' - when that's not the case. And pretending you are equal can make things complicated, even dangerous.”

“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 knew I wanted to write about a nanny, but it was difficult for me to find a narrative rhythm.”

“When you live closely with people, you don't see who they really are. In particular, with nannies, they only exist in your home, and when they leave, they don't really exist anymore for you.”

“As a mother, you're only allowed to talk about the 'good' moments - not the ones when you've had enough and want to be on your own. Or just want to be a woman, not a mother.”

“It's very important to say that French doesn't belong to France and to French people. Now you have very wonderful poets and writers in French who are not French or Algerian - who are from Senegal, from Haiti, from Canada, a lot of parts of the world.”