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

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.

Most of those who died did not die of hunger but of hatred. Feeling hatred diminishes you. It eats at your from within and attacks the immune system. When you have hatred inside you, it always crushes you in the end.

An individual voice can be heard in a choir that otherwise sings in unison. This is something that is not excused.

Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.

Our steps invent the path as we proceed; behind us they leave no trace, only the void. So we shall always look ahead and trust our feet. They will take us as far as our minds will go... -- Tahar ben Jelloun

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