To lead a country, you must periodically hold a national consultation in which people representing different programmes can make a bid for power.

We do not have many intellectuals who can speak out for us internationally. We have no writers who are recognized, respected and loved outside the Arab world.

Most of those who died did not die of hunger but of hatred. Feeling hatred diminishes you. It eats at your from within and attacks the immune system. When you have hatred inside you, it always crushes you in the end.

It is through accepting other people in our own countries that we shall come to respect our neighbours and be respected in our turn.

Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.

Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.

I have written about the dispossessed, immigrants, the condition of women who do not enjoy the same legal rights as men, the Palestinians who are deprived of their land and condemned to exile.