When I decided to stay in Iraq, I decided to take the fear out of my body and put it into a freezer.

As the only woman, I was able to sit with the officers in front, with a glass of vodka in one hand and a cucumber in the other. That's how I went to my first war.

I would like my book to give people insight to the war before and after, but I don't think anyone could read my book and suddenly make up her mind about the war. I want to write for everybody.

We don't grow up in vacuums. We grow up in societies.

I was thinking, there are 5 million people, and I am just one of those 5 million. In the build-up to the war you see children playing in the street, and you think, ah, I'm going to be okay.

We have believing in this innocent feeling of nothing will ever happen to us, because all catastrophes always broad and happening to anyone else.

If we can't understand the Afghan family, we can't understand Afghanistan.

If I leave, reality will devour me. Then they will all really be dead.

As a woman, you accept the situation, adapt to it, and do your best, whereas men would choose violence.

If I lose, then I have to accept that my way of writing books is not the way society says it's okay to write.

I always try to describe the situation just as it is. I try to find sentences that I believe tell the story best. Even my articles are more literary than ordinary news stories.

It's worked! Our marriage has outlasted all of the world leaders, except for Castro. And if we keep talking, arguing, making love and dancing to the Ramones- it'll probably keep working.

Sic vis pacem para bellum - if you want peace, prepare for war.

Even friends need private spaces, if only within the depths of their own souls, where no one else is allowed to intrude.

Read something worth writing about or write something worth reading about

The strength of a nation especially of a republican nation is in the intelligent and well-ordered homes of the people.

To die for an idea is to set a rather high price upon conjecture.

God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.

Where God tears great gaps we should not try to fill them with human words.

There is no hope the future will but turn the old sand in the falling glass of time.

God's delays are not God's denials.