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

Intellectuals try to keep going. But their situation is very difficult. Those who have had the courage to voice their opposition have often paid a very high price.

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

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.

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

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.

Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.