There is not a revolution that succeeded in a few months. It takes years, even decades, to fulfill its goals. I am very hopeful because I trust the revolution and feel nobody can really conquer a nation that has decided to be united and to fight, and we decided to fight. The revolution is there, inside the Egyptians by the millions.

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

Love has made me a different person. It has made the world beautiful.

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

There is a proverb that says, ‘Talk so that I may know who you are.’ But I say, ‘Show me your eyes and I will know who you are.

Here the oppression of women is very subtle. If we take female circumcision, the excision of the clitoris, it is done physically in Egypt. But here it is done psychologically and by education. So even if women have the clitoris, the clitoris was banned; it was removed by Freudian theory and by the mainstream culture.

The trilogy composed of politics, religion and sex is the most sensitive of all issues in any society.