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.

In the legends that males have invented to explain life, the first human creature is a man named Adam. Eve arrives later, to give him pleasure and cause trouble. In the paintings that adorn churches, God is an old man with a beard, never an old woman with white hair. And all the heroes are males: from Prometheus who discovered fire to Icarus who tried to fly, on down to Jesus whom they call the Son of God and of the Holy Spirit, almost as though the woman giving birth to him were an incubator or a wetnurse.

I always introduce myself as an encyclopedia of defects which I do not deny. Why should I? It took me a whole life to build myself as I am.

I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger.

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.

What's the point anyway - Of suffering, dying? It teaches us to live, boy. A man who does not struggle does not live, he survives.

Europe becomes more and more a province of Islam, a colony of Islam. And Italy is an outpost of that province, a stronghold of that colony... In each of our cities lies a second city: a Muslim city, a city run by the Quran. A stage in the Islamic expansionism.