Naguib Mahfouz Quotes

Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.

Fear does not prevent death. It prevents life.

I found myself in a sea in which the waves of joy and sorrow were clashing against each other.

I love Sufism as I love beautiful poetry, but it is not the answer. Sufism is like a mirage in the desert. It says to you, come and sit, relax and enjoy yourself for a while.

You know what I'm afraid of? That God is sick of us.

Visit me once each year, for it's wrong to abandon people forever.

Nothing records the effects of a sad life so graphically as the human body.

The calendar has a magic that makes us imagine a memory can be resurrected and revived, but nothing returns.

The real malady is fear of life, not of death

If you want to move people, you look for a point of sensitivity, and in Egypt nothing moves people as much as religion.

Happy is he who can give himself up.

The heart is a place of secrets.

The Arab world also won the Nobel with me. I believe that international doors have opened, and that from now on, literate people will consider Arab literature also. We deserve that recognition.

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.

Excessive concern with religion seems to me a last resort for people who have been exhausted by life.

If life has no meaning, why don't we create a meaning for it?

Art is a criticism of society and life, and I believe that if life became perfect, art would be meaningless and cease to exist.

"Death by love is fairer by far than death by illness", said Amenhotep III.

At my age it is unseemly to be pessimistic.

The writer interweaves a story with his own doubts, questions, and values. That is art.

An allegory is not meant to be taken literally. There is a great lack of comprehension on the part of some readers.

Events at home, at work, in the street - these are the bases for a story.

I defend both the freedom of expression and society's right to counter it. I must pay the price for differing. It is the natural way of things.

God did not intend religion to be an exercise club.

Only the poor are handicapped by honor.

According to Islamic principles, when a man is accused of heresy, he is given the choice between repentance and punishment.

When will the state of the country be sound?... When its people believe that the end result of cowardice is more disastrous than that of behaving with integrity.

I accepted the interviews and encounters that had to be held with the media, but I would have preferred to work in peace.

Literature should be more revolutionary than revolutions themselves; writers must find the means to continue to be critical of the negative elements in the sociopolitical reality.

If the urge to write should ever leave me, I want that day to be my last.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

He seemed to be waiting for a miracle to save him from the depths his life had reached and take him to a land of dreams.

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.

Freedom of expression must be considered sacred and thought can only be corrected by counter thought.

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.

Today's interpretations of religion are often backward and contradict the needs of civilization.

I reject any path which rejects life, but I can't help loving Sufism because it sounds so beautiful. It gives relief in the midst of battle.

I believe society has a right to defend itself, just as the individual has the right to attack that with which he disagrees.

Insults are the business of the court.

I was a government employee in the morning and a writer in the evening.

One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.

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.

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.

It is simply not part of my culture to preserve notes. I have never heard of a writer preserving his early drafts.

The criminal is trying to solve his immediate problems.

We used the Western style to express our own themes and stories. But don't forget that our heritage includes The Thousand and One Nights.

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.

paraphrasing.."Science is the language of the intellect of society. Art is language of the entire human personality.

I was afraid of marriage. I had the impression married life would take up all my time. I saw myself drowning in visits and parties. No freedom.