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The endlessly-quotable Amélie Nothomb, who appeared at a PEN Festival panel on Friday with Turkish author Buket Uzuner, has fewer worries than most literary novelists: she’s doesn’t know the meaning of writer’s block, writing for four hours every morning “without exception, even if I am sick,” and her books have brought her wealth, celebrity, and international critical acclaim. So what keeps her awake at night? The fear that her many unpublished manuscripts might, seventy-five years after her death when her sworn testimony expires, be made public:

“You might say, after seventy-five years, no problem, everyone forgets you, but there might be some crazy man or woman who remembers you, so this is a real problem for me. Because my manuscripts are my children, I cannot want to destroy them, but I want them to be unreachable…in fact, the best solution would be the Vatican, but I’m afraid the Vatican won’t take them.”

Much more on Nothomb and Uzuner’s conversation here.