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

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

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

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

My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.

Egypt has suffered more ordeals than the other countries to get where it is.

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.