Quotes from Janine di Giovanni

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 about it. He had to do something to make it fair. And so, he created the French people.

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

I did not read newspapers until I became a reporter.

Manhattan is increasingly less available to average-income earners.

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.

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.

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.

Sibling rivalry was, and still is to this day, rampant in my family. We were all competing for my parents' divided attention.

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.

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.

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.

I never set out to be a journalist. I wanted to be a humanitarian doctor like Albert Schweitzer, working in Africa.

Lake Como has always been a magnet for the elite.

No one lives on credit in France because banks don't allow overdrafts and zero percent credit cards do not exist.

It's always disappointing to come across phony do-gooders. And it's easy to scoff at celebrities working in war zones.

My role [as a war correspondent] is to bring a voice to people who are voiceless [and] to shine a light in the darkest corners of the world.

In the aftermath of any war or genocide, healing and reconciliation are ultimate aspirations.

It's hard for the Catholic Church to accept change. When the mass was no longer said in Latin, loyalists went into mourning for years.

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.

Every time the Catholic Church takes one step forward, it seems to take one giant step back.

In a very straightforward way, I am a terrible reporter. I'm not someone who can go into a story and not get involved.

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 met someone who I felt was my soulmate.