“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.”
“From the earliest age, I was just different. I think that's part of every writer's little revenge. You think, 'I'm not a blonde, blue-eyed cheerleader but I'm going to get out of here and do something.'”
“I know being pregnant and giving birth is the most wonderful thing on Earth. I know that after you have a baby, there is a sense of addiction, a need to have another. It's biological.”
“I often think I am a better person because I lived for many years of my life with a flashlight. I have developed skills I did not think were possible - bathing with a cup of water by candlelight, for instance, and writing a story with a headlamp on.”
“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.”
“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.”
“To be a good reporter, writing about war, you have to write about the people. It's not about the tanks or the RPGs or military strategy. It's always about the effect war has on civilians, on society, and how it disrupts and destroys lives.”
“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.”
“Nonviolence worked in Serbia, and it can work in other countries seeking their freedom.”
“Any protester knows that the only way activism works is to get the people on your side.”