Plastic surgery is a postmodern veil.

You know, I look to myself mainly as a creative writer all my life and a medical doctor.

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.

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

I am very much against makeup and high heels and all that we inherit as 'beauty.'

First of all, I hated the medical profession. Medical education in Egypt was taken from the British, French, colonial educational system. And it's very, very lacking - there is no sexology. I never read the word clitoris in any medical book when I was educated.

The feminists who are aware of the effects of patriarchy realize that we are all in the same boat from the dangers of patriarchy, and that the oppression of women is universal.