All the men I did get to know, every single man of them, has filled me with but one desire: to lift my hand and bring it smashing down on his face.

The tracing of a child's lineage and its name with reference to the father, though it has lasted for many thousands of years, has not become any the more natural or reasonable as a result.

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.

Home to me is the world because my books have been translated into more than 30 languages. People feel they know me and the minute they talk about my life or books I feel at home. Home is where you are appreciated, safe and protected, creative, and where you are loved – not where you are put in prison.

During the '80s I wrote Memoirs from the Women's Prison. This is one of my most important books. It came out in Arabic in '83. About my experience in prison.

I never stopped writing. I started writing when I was twelve years of age. And I was writing all the time. But nothing was translated until thirty years after I started writing, when The Hidden Face of Eve was translated in 1980.

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 Was it linked to a new order in which the female goddesses had been replaced by one male god?