Janine di Giovanni

“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...”

“There is a painful joke that Europeans often tell of their Gallic neighbors: God created France, the most beautiful country in the world with so much good in it, and ended up feeling guilty...”

“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...”

“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 candlel...”

“Africa is a very dangerous place.”

“Occupy Wall Street was a disorganized movement without a clear focus and power base - essential in any successful revolution - but the message was clear: the divisions between those who are...”

“In Paris, where I live, the inner neighborhoods are only available to the white elite. The poor and dispossessed are shuffled out to suburbs and never seen.”

“Manhattan is increasingly less available to average-income earners.”

“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 worryin...”

“The pope is an intelligent man and realizes that time marches on. He says the Church has a long way to go in developing a real strategy that integrates women - but clearly he is baffled as t...”

“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.”

“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 net...”

“It is a well known urban myth that the French don't trust banks and store their money under their mattress. It's not that they are tight with money - they just don't trust anyone.”

“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.”

“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,...”

“I spent a good part of the nineties roaming the Earth writing about conflict. It was very grueling. I was beginning to find this way of life was, wow, addictive and deeply meaningful.”

“Nonviolence worked in Serbia, and it can work in other countries seeking their freedom.”

“I'm not sure that finding a husband at university made me any less of a feminist or an academic. I still soaked up Susan Faludi; I still read Doris Lessing. But I did it at the same time I m...”

“Even as a small child, I wondered why the Dominican nuns who educated me were subservient to the Jesuit priests who educated my brothers.”

“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 s...”