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

We must stop posing as victims of the West and behaving negatively towards the West. We must participate with the West on an equal footing in the reconstruction of the world.

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

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

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.

We have no Arab intellectuals of international stature because we live in a state of generalized mediocrity. We are suspended in the pit without touching the bottom.

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.