I met Indira Gandhi in her office in the government palace. The same office that had been her father's - large, cold and plain. She was sitting, small and slender, behind a bare desk. When I entered, she got up and came forward to give me her hand, then sat down again and cut the preliminaries short by fixing me with a gaze that meant: Go ahead with the first question, don't waste time, I really have no time to waste.

There are moments in Life when keeping silent becomes a fault, and speaking an obligation. A civic duty, a moral challenge, a categorical imperative from which we cannot escape.

I cry, sometimes, because I'm not 20 years younger, and I'm not healthy. But if I were, I would even sacrifice my writing to enter politics.

I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. There must be some human truth that is beyond religion.

Finally [Indira Ganhi] called a beautiful dark little boy who was playing on the lawn, and embracing him tenderly, murmured, 'This is my grandchild; this is the man I love most in the world.' It was a strange sensation to watch this very powerful woman embracing a child.

It brought back to mind the injustice I spoke of, the solitude that oppresses women intent on defending their own destinies, their own dreams, their own mistakes.

A lot of women ask themselves why they should bring a child into the world? So that it will be hungry, so that it will be cold, so that it will be betrayed and humiliated, so that it will be slaughtered by war or disease? They reject the hope that its hunger will be satisfied, its cold warmed, that loyalty and respect will accompany it through life, that it will be a devote a life to the effort to eliminate war and disease.