Janine di Giovanni

“Full disclosure: I went to university as an eager young feminist for many reasons - to get away from my parents, to soak up literature and knowledge, to cease being a child, to expand my mind and my world.”

“My earliest memories are of the civil rights era. My earliest experiences were rage.”

“Stockholm is surely an urban planner's dream. Everything works. Everything looks good.”

“Once Iraq became a hot bed for kidnapping, reporters had to use every kind of trick they could manage to avoid it. This included chase cars, security men for more prosperous agencies and networks, and GPS signals on satellite phones that could pinpoint the journalist's locations.”

“When I did a year-long study in 2005 of European countries integrating Muslims into their cultures, France came in the lowest of the rank. Sweden was not far behind, though, which is worrying, as racism in France is much closer to the bone.”

“In America, people know there are always 10 people better than them who are after their job. In France, they know that too - but no one is going to get their job till they go to their grave.”

“In Pakistan, the right to go to school is not a given. In the more rural areas, a girl is born, married off as early as 9 years old, and basically lives life under the control of men.”

“My own mother, my sister and nearly all the women in my family had full-time jobs as mothers. They were wonderful at it. They drove their children back and forth to soccer, skating lessons, piano lessons, private schools, but I sensed, even in my own mother, a kind of distant dissatisfaction.”

“Lake Como has always been a magnet for the elite.”

“In Iraq during the days of Saddam, I had a government minder who followed me everywhere, reported on my activities.”

“I love magazines. I always read 'Time,' 'Newsweek' and 'The Economist.' When I get my hair cut, French 'Vogue,' French 'Elle,' 'Paris Match' - I read them all in 10 minutes.”

“There are people who are seekers and people who aren't.”

“I see so many people get so wrapped up in wanting to get a bigger SUV or a bigger house. But then I think, 'My God, I could have been born a woman in the Congo.'”

“Hats, giant shades and 60-plus sunblock are part of my summer repertoire. I don't want wrinkles, but it's skin cancer I truly fear.”

“Every time I went to the doctor when I was in my twenties, he repeated the same thing to me: don't wait too long to have children.”

“I have never been embedded with the American army or, you know, with the big war machine.”

“When you write non-fiction, you sit down at your desk with a pile of notebooks, newspaper clippings, and books and you research and put a book together the way you would a jigsaw puzzle.”

“Sarajevo was this beautiful city, very cosmopolitan, multiethnic, full of wonderful people, artists and writers and poets and Serbs and Muslims and Croats, and living side by side. And then this medieval siege, and it was a medieval siege, came, and the Bosnian Serbs were on the hills lobbing in rockets and grenades and mortars.”

“For the first five years of Luca's life, I desperately wanted to be a good mother and not to pass on this trauma and darkness that his father and I had experienced, but there's a danger of suffocating your kids, too.”

“During war time, when people were injured, I was really frustrated I did not become a doctor. It's painful not being able to save people, witnessing their pain.”