moral codes and standards in our societies very rarely apply to all people equally. This is the most damning proof of how immoral such codes and standards really are.

Something I tried to hold onto, to touch if only for a moment, but it slipped away from me like the air, like an illusion, or a dream that floats away and is lost. I wept in my sleep as though it was something I was losing now; a loss I was experiencing for the first time, and not something I had lost a long time ago.

Woman at Point Zero I wrote during the '70s in Arabic. It came in English in '82. So, almost ten years' difference between the Arabic and the English.

Everybody has to die, Firdaus. I will die, and you will die. The important thing is how to live until you die.

She is free to do what she wants, and free not to do it.

When I am in Egypt, I am phoned because I am listed in the medical directory under "Mental Health and Psychiatry." And of course, I see very few people, because I give much more time to writing. So I cannot say that I really stopped medicine, but I practice medicine - or psychiatry - in a very different way. In an artistic way!

I've lived here [in Egypt] among Christians and Muslims, and we never had a conflict. Now you have a conflict between Christians and Muslims and Baha'is and Sunni and Shia. The Salafists are trying to abort the revolution and make it religious, though the revolution started secular.