Mahmoud Darwish

I don't decide to represent anything except myself. But that self is full of collective memory.

Some people ask, 'How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?' I say, 'My accomplishment is that my readers trust me and accept my suggestions for change.'

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.

To be under occupation, to be under siege, is not a good inspiration for poetry.

Without hope we are lost.

Palestinian people are in love with life.

The Arabs are ready to accept a strong Israel with nuclear arms - all it has to do is open the gates of its fortress and make peace.

Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down.

I see poetry as spiritual medicine.

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.

When I passed the age of 50, I learned how to control my emotions.

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.