ASNE SEIERSTAD

If my name had not been cleared, it would have been difficult, perhaps impossible, to continue as a journalist.

The judgment means a lot. As a journalist being accused of invading someone's privacy, there is always a risk that it will stick to your name.

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

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.

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.

The book came after the fall of the Taliban, it says something about Afghan family life. Those kind of stories - what happens behind the scenes on a TV screen - are important.

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

There is nothing I would change - to change it I would have had to write a totally different book.

The family is the single most important institution in Afghan culture. It is described in the country's constitution as the 'fundamental pillar of society'.

I will get a loan and pay the money the court asks for. But I will not lay down my writing and I still say this was an important book to write.

I'm trying to see my own country with fresh eyes.

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

Being a war correspondent, and having covered four wars, I know that wars very seldom solve things.

Even in a war, someone has to take care of daily life. Someone has to feed and clothe the children.

I think when you start to get afraid, it's time to leave.

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

If you've lived in a dictatorship for thirty years, you're used to people lying to you.

As a war correspondent, you have to weigh the risk you run against the story you can get.

There are personal reasons, psychological reasons, but there could also be political reasons for becoming a terrorist.

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.

It was very difficult to write about my own country, because I have always been the outsider looking in.

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

There is no journalist without opinions, and there's no real objectivity, but we can strive toward it.

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.