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.

Emigration is no longer a solution; it's a defeat. People are risking death, drowning every day, but they're knocking on doors that are not open.

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

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

I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.

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

I love life in spite of all that mars it. I love friendship, jokes and laughter.