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.

In the 70s I was in exile; every time I went back I wondered if they'd take my passport away.

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.

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.

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.

For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.