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!

We here in Egypt are fed up with U.S. colonialism.

Thus, after a period of about two thousand years the greatest crime became to worship a god other than the God of Moses, whereas injustice became a minor sin. I began to ask myself how this change had come about. Was it linked to a new order in which the female goddesses had been replaced by one male god?

We never know the reality of things: we see only what we are aware of. It is our consciousness that determines the shape of the world around us -- its size, motion and meaning.

To me, 'beauty' means to be natural, creative, honest - to say the truth.

Revolutionary men with principles were not really different from the rest. They used their cleverness to get, in return for principles, what other men buy with their money.

Interviewer: What would you say to a woman in this country who assumes she is no longer oppressed, who believes women's liberation has been achieved? el Saadawi: Well I would think she is blind. Like many people who are blind to gender problems, to class problems, to international problems. She's blind to what's happening to her.