Nawal El Saadawi Quotes

People have said I'm a puppet, an instrument of my grandfather, but I think they quickly realised that I'm my own person, that I have autonomy in my actions. I think they rapidly realised I could look after myself.

For me, it is freedom, freedom from everything: when I write, I'm not a woman. I'm not a Muslim. I'm not a Moroccan. I can reinvent myself, and I can reinvent the world.

As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.

The trouble is, I can't find a part of myself where you're not important. I write in order to be worth your while and to finance the way I want to live with you. Not the way you want to live. The way I want to live with you. Without you I wouldn't care. I'd eat tinned spaghetti and put on yesterday's clothes. But as it is I change my socks, and make money, and tart up Brodie's unspeakable drivel into speakable drivel so he can be an author too, like me.

You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.

You've got to make choices that make sense for you because there's always going to be somebody who'll think you should do something differently.

I will not hide my tastes or aversions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own.

I've learned to really just say no. If I don't want to do something, I won't do it. There's nothing that can make me do anything.

Our lives are made up of thousands of everyday choices. Over the years these little choices will be bundled together and show clearly what we value.

For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.

We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.

I either write the book or sell the jewels. And I'm kinda sentimental about the jewels.

What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

This is my life; these are my fingerprints; I'm unique; this is what I want to do. You worry about your own front porch and what's happening in your own world.

I'm not representing other people. I'm representing me.

A personal mission statement becomes the DNA for every other decision we make.

The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.

Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it's time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.

I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.

What is important in your life is what you decide is important -- and this decision will indelibly create who you are

A couple months after my heart attack, fifty-seven years after I'd given it up, I started to write again. I did it for myself alone, not for anyone else, and that was the difference. It didn't matter if I found the words, and more than that, I knew it would be impossible to find the right ones.

Life choices and projects and photo shoots, I can't base them on anybody else but myself. I've done things where I'm like, "Do I want my dad to see this? I don't know!" But the best lesson I can teach my sisters, or any younger women, is "Do what YOU do. Don't follow me, follow you."

My advice to women who habitually gravitate toward musicians is that they learn how to play an instrument and start making music themselves. Not only will they see that it's not that hard, but sometimes I think women just want to be the very thing they think they want to sleep with. Because if you're bright enough--no offense, Tawny Kitaen--sleeping with a musician probably won't be enough for you to feel good about yourself. Even if he writes you a song for your birthday. Don't you know that a musician who writes a song for you is like a baker you're dating making you a cake? Aim higher.