My hope is that countries like Morocco will have investment to create work, so people don't have to leave.

The world does not look to us in the Arab world out of a healthy desire for knowledge.

I have written about the dispossessed, immigrants, the condition of women who do not enjoy the same legal rights as men, the Palestinians who are deprived of their land and condemned to exile.

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

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.