We older women in Europe are lucky not to be shoved away in a drawer.

Thank God we're not like America. Everyone wants to look like they're 20. In Europe we admire grown-up women I think men revere older women.

The fact that the church is convinced of not having the right to confer priestly ordination on women is now considered by some as irreconcilable with the European Constitution.

We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization but this is not true. Slavery still exists but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.

That sense of what happened in Europe in World War II has shaped a lot of my views.

What President Bush did in his doctrine of preemptive strike and in his war in Afghanistan and in Iraq was to turn even his allies in Europe negatively toward America.

I made a French film called 'Merry Christmas' which is a very European film. It's a World War I piece.

In the months leading up to World War II there was a tendency among many Americans to talk absently about the trouble in Europe. Nothing that happened an ocean away seemed very threatening.

Suicidal violence is not the exclusive property of the Muslim world. Suicide bombings were a tactic of nationalist struggles in 19th-century Europe and Russia the far east during the second world war and the Vietnam war and in modern Sri Lanka.

It was quite a European war until 1917 when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out.