In the Arab world, there is no link between the cultural habits of peoples and the ways of thinking and creating of modern intellectuals. They are two separate worlds.

I'd thought sexuality was instinctive or natural, but it's profoundly linked to inner security and cultural context.

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

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

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.

In Morocco, it's possible to see the Atlantic and the Mediterranean at the same time.

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.