The mistake we make is to attribute to religions the errors and fanaticism of human beings.

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.

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

People must insist on the right to say no, to be alone, to stand out from the herd. Creative artists can say all this in their own way and in their own field, by hard, rigorous work.

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

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

I am a Moroccan writer of French expression.