It is the creator of fiction’s point of view; it is the character who interests him. Sometimes he wants to convince the reader that the story he is telling is as interesting as universal history.

I write about wounds, the eternal treasons of life. It’s not very funny, but it’s sincere. My commitment is to sincerity.

Casey was the better team and the better team won.

But sweetly and discreetly love passes from person to person, from heart to heart, or it is nothing worth.

To have one’s own story told by a third party who doesn’t know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that’s a technical refinement.

New ideas should confront old ideas. We must refer to the example of Europe. People have fought to make Europe what it is today. Freedom is not something that is served up on a plate.

I bend and do not break.

There are divers men who make a great show of loyalty, and pretend to such discretion in the hidden things they hear, that at the end folk come to put faith in them.

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

This universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one’s mother tongue.

Never sell the bear’s skin before one has killed the beast.

It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein.

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

I will leave no memoirs.

Fairest and dearest, your wrath and anger are more heavy than I can bear; but learn that I cannot tell what you wish me to say without sinning against my honour too grievously.

We think of giving importance to history, but it is the individual who is interesting, and we want to give him a historical importance.

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,...

It is a double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

To lead a country, you must periodically hold a national consultation in which people representing different programmes can make a bid for power.

By the work one knows the workman.

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.

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

Arithmetic! Algebra! Geometry! Grandiose trinity! Luminous triangle! Whoever has not known you is without sense!

For above all things Love means sweetness, and truth, and measure; yea, loyalty to the loved one and to your word. And because of this I dare not meddle with so high a matter.

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

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

It is impossible to please all the world and one’s father.

A man who is “of sound mind” is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.

I am a Moroccan writer of French expression.

We do not have many intellectuals who can speak out for us internationally. We have no writers who are recognized, respected and loved outside the Arab world.

But the shortest works are always the best.

The Iliad is the private lives of people thrown into disorder by history.

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

Naturally I drew register a little exaggerated, in order to create something new in the sense of a sublime literature that sings of despair only in order to oppress the reader, and make him desire...

For what the lover would, that would the beloved; what she would ask of him that should he go before to grant. Without accord such as this, love is but a bond and a constraint.

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

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.

Let ignorance talk as it will, learning has its value.

In the Odyssey, there are technical refinements which are extremely remarkable, and I’m surprised they aren’t mentioned more often.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

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.

Be advised that all flatterers live at the expense of those who listen to them.

The Odyssey is the story of Americans up to the point where they are well-established, and even so it is detached from the historical side.

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.

Poetry must be made by all and not by one.

Great were the lamentation and the cry when the news of this mischance was noised about the city. Such a tumult of mourning was never before heard, for the whole city was moved.

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.

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