Danger has been a part of my life ever since I picked up a pen and wrote. Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies.

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 knew I hated him as only a woman can hate a man, as only a slave can hate his master.

Memory is never complete. There are always parts of it that time has amputated. Writing is a way of retrieving them, of bringing the missing parts back to it, of making it more holistic.

We see our homeland more clearly when we are away from it than when we are in it.

Yet not for a single moment did I have any doubts about my own integrity and honour as a woman. I knew that my profession had been invented by men, and that men were in control of both our worlds, the one on earth, and the one in heaven. That men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another.

Democracy is not just freedom to criticize the government or head of state, or to hold parliamentary elections. True democracy obtains only when the people - women, men, young people, children - have the ability to change the system of industrial capitalism that has oppressed them since the earliest days of slavery: a system based on class division, patriarchy, and military might, a hierarchical system that subjugates people merely because they are born poor, or female, or dark-skinned.