I love life in spite of all that mars it. I love friendship, jokes and laughter.

I write about wounds, the eternal treasons of life. It's not very funny, but it's sincere. My commitment is to sincerity.

I have written about the dispossessed, immigrants, the condition of women who do not enjoy the same legal rights as men, the Palestinians who are deprived of their land and condemned to exile.

Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl.

For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.

I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.