“Egypt is kind of like the Hollywood of the Middle East. I mean, we had cinema maybe decades before the other Arab countries ever got independence.”

The only the way that you can live and function without seeing the facts in front of you is to put yourself in a constant state of denial.

I think that the religious and the military right wings are just two sides of the same coin if somebody uses God and religion and somebody uses country and security.

The worst thing ever that you have to explain your joke because I was very disappointed trying to explain why the joke is funny for the interrogator.

People say, ‘Are you afraid? Are you scared for your life?’ and I tell them: If I choose today to tone it down, if I choose today to shut up, tomorrow me, you, and all of us will be forced to.

This transcends any kind of religion and any kind of belief. This is actually an offense and attack on human values. He’s just saying out there I will shoot people in the face and people wouldn’t care.

I always tell people that a revolution is not an event, it’s a process. It is a struggle. And it doesn’t usually go smoothly.

We have Internet now and people are not stupid. But it seems that some people are trying to push the same agenda of the Cold War of conspiracy theories and amazing achievements that are very easily traced and validated.

People would believe propagate, spread rumors or conspiracy theories in order to protect their own system of denial.

People went out there and they wrote articles and went on television shows saying that I am an operative that the CIA who used Jon Stewart to recruit me. So Jon Stewart, who actually – a guy from America was used by the CIA in order to recruit me for the CIA and be.

Everybody grows up with comedy. I mean, Egyptian comedy has a very, very old tradition. Our theater and our movies are just, like, amazing.

There are people who believe in Egypt that I – I’m actually – I’m getting paid by external powers and external intelligence entities in order to use satire to bring down the government.

What I saw day-to-day is like people who are actually asking for freedom, calling for freedom – protesting, singing, chanting, calling for the removal of the regime – plain and simple.

Satire has its limits. It is really up to the people to make the change. The satirist’s role ends at the screen.

And of course there were clashes there because people, they tried to remove those protesters from Tahrir. And I was, like, doing my job as a doctor treating them.

It is very difficult to imagine that you can actually get rid of a dictatorship that has been there for 60 years only in 18 days.

It doesn’t matter if the truth is right there out in front of your eyes. You will find a way, a mechanism, in order to keep your own system of denial. So as I always say it, denial is a river that runs in the – in Egypt. So we became very good in that.

Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama.

It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.

As beautiful as cinema is, it’s a massive part of the problem of why we look at ourselves in the way we do.

A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan.

We really are living in the era that all this sci-fi literature and cinema was centered around.

Performing a one-man Macbeth feels like the greatest challenge.

The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.

Movie queens diffuse into Cinema haze, while libertines read pornozines in street cafes.