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“People tell me, ‘There are so many things wrong with the Arab world, why do you just talk about sex?’ And I say, ‘This is the main link.’ Who decides what’s haram — what’s allowed and not allowed? The religious figures. They are linked with the political powers, and together they work to control the society through this medium, the sex drive. If you break the power over sex, you can start undermining and questioning the religious and political powers. You cannot do it the other way around.”

“If you don’t feel humiliated and insulted, nothing is going to change. We don’t need reconstruction in the Arab world. We need destruction and construction. We can’t just try to make it better. We have to cancel it and have a fresh start.”
- NY Times, March 21, 2011
 
 
"I don't like to call it work. It's mainly just for poetry readings. It's exhausting, but this is what life is all about."

- The National, November 27, 2010
 
 
"You have to invent the right moment, you can’t just sit around and wait for it to happen. You invent the moment, you create time."

- redleb.com - March 30, 2009
 
 
"I am against 'devoting' poetry to communicate messages of any type, or to promote certain ideologies, regardless of how noble the goals of these ideologies are, even if it is a poetic ideology aiming to serve poetry and its presence in our world. We don't serve poetry but by writing it."

- Taiky - November 2007
 
 
"It was what I wanted to do and I did it, people end up accepting it."

"There is continuity in my poems despite the changes in my life."

- The Daily Star - Lebanon - January 25, 2007
 
 
"This may be a surprise coming from a poet who has been traveling a lot during these past few years, participating in poetry festivals all around the world; but the truth is, I'm not comfortable about reading my texts in front of a public. I always feel like I'm stripping myself before strangers' eyes. Not quite my thing…"

- LiteraryTranslation.com - August 17, 2006
   
   

"Poetry does not wear ladies' gowns, doesn't shave a beard, doesn't wear lipsticks and doesn't serve in military. I don't mean it is a body without a soul, but it is an exceptionally gendered creature, who doesn't dominate one gender and leave the other, because it embodies the meeting of masculinity and femininity altogether."

"I have always been a quiet rational child from the outside, and a naughty tamed one inside, screaming at my brother for a game because I can not stand loss, obsessed with reading and rebellious to the banned, does not play with dolls but steal books that do not suit my age from my father's library and read them in secret."

- Al-Safeer - November 30, 2004
   
   

"Poetry does not play a salvational role, and I don't write poetry to escape my reality but I live my life with all its details, love and glow, and I live my poems with all its volcanoes and fires."

"As long as there is a small seed or a shying spot inside one lover's heart it will be sufficient to save the humanity from the mud of materialism." 

- Fairouz - February 2003
   
   
"The body is the soul, and each of them is present in the other, the materiality of the body is not apart of its spiritual being, and throughout my poetry I try to protect this inner duality."

- Nida' Al-Watan - December 2, 1998