“I built on the efforts of a previous scientist, others will build on the work I’m doing and if I look at the whole scope from chemistry to biology to physics, it’s just the list is too long to mention just one and it’s not fair to the others.”

Women made up nearly half my class at university, and my senior academic adviser there was a woman. In Alexandria, my friends were Christians and Muslims.

There is a danger one has to really be knowing much more because you can’t be too narrow on science.

I came from Egypt and I owe Egypt a lot to what I am now.

I do feel quite strongly about this that probably one of the things that unfortunately this age now to get a Nobel Prize is to really use part of it to help the young people get excited about science.

Perhaps the most valuable thing he taught me (his father) was that there is no contradiction between devotion to work and enjoyment of life and people

The fastest possible speeds are determined by their molecular vibrations and this speeds is about a kilometre per second.

And the other thing also which I’m hoping for is that the government in Egypt is willing and interested in promoting science and technology and this is an ideal time now to be able to do something.

Everybody thinks some times that science is done as a master plan and that somebody like me came from Mars and figured out everything and so on, but that’s really not the way it worked.

So, that’s my intention to focus my efforts there and I hope I will be able to do so.

I do have a concern however, humanity has a great way of adapting and I’m sure scientists of the future, probably after I leave this planet, earth will have a new way of dealing with the internet but I do have a concern in the transition period.

There are many, many books I’ve read and I think this is quite naïve actually because we all just try to uncover something.

When I was a child, I thought of my Delta town as the center of the universe, but now I realize how little I know about the universe.

For me to sit down here, even as a Nobel Laureate and make a prediction about which science I think that will be a mistake.

Of course you can imagine I was frozen in time when he said that but then he made a very famous statement, something to the effect that this is the last 20 minutes of peace of your life.

I thought in my Nobel Lecture I pointed that I was delighted that the Swedish Academy of Science did not quote anything about my current work right now, because the current work that my group is focusing on is actually both the time resolve.

When I give a lecture on Egypt there are thousands of people in the lecture hall, so obviously they would like to go to science and they would love to do science, but you really have to get the correct science base in order for them to interact.

Nobody is smarter than you are. And what if they are? What good is their understanding doing you?

A person always doing his or her best becomes a natural leader, just by example.

I admire Madonna because she always did whatever she felt like doing. She went through some controversial periods when people rejected her, but she kept on reinventing herself.

I’ve done without doing things, like sleeping and eating, but I need to write.

I’m never content with what I do. I live in a sort of permanent dissatisfaction. I think that’s the secret to doing things well.

This personal freedom to think and feel and speak authentically and to be conscious of so doing is the quality that distinguishes us as human.

I have a sort of empty feeling; nothing in the world seems of sufficient importance to be worth the doing.

I’m eighteen years behind in my ironing. There’s no use doing it now, it doesn’t fit anybody I know.