Sarcasm helps me overcome the harshness of the reality we live, eases the pain of scars and makes people smile.
Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.
The metaphor for Palestine is stronger than the Palestine of reality.
A person can only be born in one place. However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare.
Without hope we are lost.
I believe in the power of poetry, which gives me reasons to look ahead and identify a glint of light.
Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.
I don't decide to represent anything except myself. But that self is full of collective memory.
Nothing, nothing justifies terrorism.
Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by.
The Palestinians are the only nation in the world that feels with certainty that today is better than what the days ahead will hold. Tomorrow always heralds a worse situation.
I never wanted children; maybe I'm afraid of responsibility.
History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor.
The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.
I see poetry as spiritual medicine.
Sometimes I feel as if I am read before I write. When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol for Palestine. But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother. She's not a symbol.
Palestinian people are in love with life.
When I passed the age of 50, I learned how to control my emotions.
When a writer declares that his first book is his best, that is bad. I progress successively from book to book.
I am not a lover of Israel, of course. I have no reason to be. But I don't hate Jews.
