Accordingly, if you are a fanatic, you will never appreciate literature. And if you appreciate literature you will never be a fanatic. Fanaticism is about black and white: People are either good or bad. People are either with us or against us. On the other side, literature is absolutely the contrary. Literature gives us a broad spectrum of human possibilities. It teaches us how to feel other people suffering. When you read a good novel, you forget about the nationality of the character. You forget about his or her religion. You forget about his skin color or her skin color. You only understand the human. You understand that this is a human being, the same way we are. And so reading great novels absolutely can remake us as much better human beings.

A dictator can never be comfortable with literature, for many reasons. First, the novelist feels absolutely free to write whatever he wants. Second, fiction has a very strong influence over the people, much more than political speeches, because it requires us to use our imagination. Finally, dictators never feel comfortable with novelists because they don't feel secure. They believe that even if you aren’t talking directly about them, you mean to portray them indirectly. Under Mubarak, I wrote some animal stories, like the fables of Jean de la Fontaine. One of them featured a very old elephant who is no longer capable to rule the forest, and is trying to push his son to become king. But the young elephant is clearly stupid, unable to do anything but play with the water. The generals of security were very, very angry about these articles—you cannot imagine. They believed I meant old elephant is Mubarak, and the young elephant is his son—which was true. They put severe pressure on the owner of the newspaper to stop the articles. This is just one example.

It’s very hard when you write, and you try and try to do your best, and you cannot reach your readers because of censorship. It's a terrible experience. In Egypt, I was refused [the opportunity] to be published by the government, which was the only way to get published at that time. During the 1990s, I was refused three times: 1990, 1994, and 1998. And in ’98, I was refused in a very impolite way: not only refused, but refused and humiliated. I got so frustrated, I decided to quit. I was working on a new novel, and I decided to finish that novel and that would be it. I said to my wife, “I gave literature ten years of my life, and she gave me nothing but very bad moments.” I said I wanted to emigrate, and she accepted. But when I finished the novel, The Yacoubian Building, it became a phenomenon. And that changed everything.

I write to help people understand how terrible it is to live without freedom. I don’t write about “politics.” We don't have political lives in Egypt because we don't have a democracy. We have a one-man show. We have, always, a dictator who decides for everybody. But we do have a struggle for democracy. We have a struggle against torture, against dictatorship, against oppression and repression. And to reflect this is part of my duty as a writer. I cannot write about flowers while the people are killed in the streets. I cannot, because I always write what I feel—and I'm living in Egypt, and I see how people suffer, and I belong to these people. So I try to find the literary, the artistic, inside their suffering, or through their suffering. I write about human beings—and part of the suffering of the human being is living under a dictator who is willing to kill anybody, and torture everybody, to keep power. I write about how being free and keeping our dignity is a very important thing. And if people can be convinced by novels about that, they are going to revolt.