Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl.

I read a poem every night, as others read a prayer.

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.

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

Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.

At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets.

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