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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.