In Egypt today most people are concerned with getting bread to eat. Only some of the educated understand how democracy works.
You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.
As the tension eases, we must look in the direction of agriculture, industry and education as our final goals, and toward democracy under Mr Mubarak.
It's clearly more important to treat one's fellow man well than to be always praying and fasting and touching one's head to a prayer mat.
One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.
I was suffering from a peculiar and persistent sense that I was being pursued, and also the conviction that under the political order of the times, our lives had no meaning.
I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday.
An allegory is not meant to be taken literally. There is a great lack of comprehension on the part of some readers.
We are passing through a very sensitive time, and on the whole, this country is facing very big problems.
There are no heroes in most of my stories. I look at our society with a critical eye and find nothing extraordinary in the people I see.
I wake up early in the morning and walk for an hour. If I have something to write, I prefer to write in the morning until midday, and in the afternoon, I eat.
We are like a woman with a difficult pregnancy. We have to rebuild the social classes in Egypt, and we must change the way things were.