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.

I do not use the language of my people. I can take liberties with certain themes which the Arabic language would not allow me to take.

In the Arab world, there is no link between the cultural habits of peoples and the ways of thinking and creating of modern intellectuals. They are two separate worlds.

My hope is that countries like Morocco will have investment to create work, so people don't have to leave.

In Morocco, it's possible to see the Atlantic and the Mediterranean at the same time.

Religion has to stay in the heart, not in politics. It is private.

What have we achieved since the end of the Second World War? We have allowed petty, bourgeois regimes in which everything is average, mediocre.