“. . . as far as the regime is concerned, well, the play is sheer terror for them. Because they feel, How dare – how dare anybody lift his or her voice in criticism against us? We have the guns. Their level of paranoia and power-drunkenness is unbelievable.”

The media must be used effectively to reach the masses. You have to find a new language in which to address the people and demonstrate what is possible.

I’m not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I’ve never understood.

Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.

I have no money to give to you but I have ideas and organizational capacity.

For me, a writer is already being the deuce of his mission, his occupation to society.

If man cannot, what god dare claim perfection?

Writers are human. I shudder to think how I must sometimes appear to others.

I am a very curious person; I’ll always ask: is this thing true, is it not true? And I use my own means to investigate and come to my conclusion.

I have one abiding religion-human liberty.

We do not ask the mountain’s aid to crack a walnut.

Some of us – poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes – beyond the word.

I know there are writers who get up every morning and sit by their typewriter or word processor or pad of paper and wait to write. I don’t function that way. I go through a long period of gestation before I’m even ready to write.

It’s the place to begin, always — to return to home, literally.

I said: “A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces”. In other words: a tiger does not stand in the forest and say: “I am a tiger”. When you pass where the tiger has walked before, you see the skeleton of the duiker, you know that some tigritude has been emanated there.

Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness.

But when you’re deprived of it for a lengthy period then you value human companionship. But you have to survive and so you devise all kinds of mental exercises and it’s amazing.

Valor is the contempt of death and pain.

Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.

Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are.

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

I feel terrible for a Palestinian child who dies. But, if it’s your father, your brother or your uncle who was firing those rockets into Israel, whose fault is it really? Do you really expect the Israelis not to retaliate?

Every morning when I open my eyes, I feel possibility.

If you’re feeling down and times are blue, Remember this and know its true.  Tomorrow you can always start anew. A new day to seize, positivity your virtue.

Making me feel small won’t make you feel tall I’ve faced bigger giants than you and watched them fall.