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

I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.

There is an important erotic element in A Thousand and One Nights, which is one of the keys to understanding the Orient.

I don't feel guilty about expressing myself in French; nor do I feel that I am continuing the work of the colonizers.

It is impossible to disregard such an important medium as television. We should know how to use it, learn to work in it and express new values in it.

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.

I am glad to have found a readership, but one can’t write only what is likely to sell. A writer is not a shopkeeper. A writer creates an imaginary world that he transmits to others.