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If the urge to write should ever leave me, I want that day to be my last.

Naguib Mahfouz

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Naguib Mahfouz
Age: 94 †
Born: 1911
Born: December 11
Died: 2006
Died: August 30
Artist
Autobiographer
Film Writer
Intellectual
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Translator
Writer
Cairo
Egypt
Naguib Mahfouz Abdelaziz Ibrahim Ahmed Al-Basha
Ever
Writing
Urge
Urges
Leave
Literature
Lasts
Last
Write

More quotes by Naguib Mahfouz

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I defend both the freedom of expression and society's right to counter it. I must pay the price for differing. It is the natural way of things.
Naguib Mahfouz
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He seemed to be waiting for a miracle to save him from the depths his life had reached and take him to a land of dreams.
Naguib Mahfouz
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Home is not where you were born home is where all your attempts to escape cease.
Naguib Mahfouz
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Writing is for men who can think and feel, not mindless sensation seekers out of nightclubs and bars. But these are bad times. We are condemned to work with upstarts, clowns who no doubt got their training in a circus and then turned to journalism as the appropriate place to display their tricks.
Naguib Mahfouz
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The criminal is trying to solve his immediate problems.
Naguib Mahfouz
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The Nobel Prize has given me, for the first time in my life, the feeling that my literature could be appreciated on an international level.
Naguib Mahfouz
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I am the son of two civilizations that at a certain age in history have formed a happy marriage. The first of these, seven thousand years old, is the Pharaonic civilization the second, one thousand four hundred years old, is the Islamic civilization.
Naguib Mahfouz
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Fear does not prevent death. It prevents life.
Naguib Mahfouz
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You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.
Naguib Mahfouz
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When will the state of the country be sound?... When its people believe that the end result of cowardice is more disastrous than that of behaving with integrity.
Naguib Mahfouz
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It is simply not part of my culture to preserve notes. I have never heard of a writer preserving his early drafts.
Naguib Mahfouz
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The Arab world also won the Nobel with me. I believe that international doors have opened, and that from now on, literate people will consider Arab literature also. We deserve that recognition.
Naguib Mahfouz
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For the first time in my life, I felt that a wave, a justice was sweeping away a deep-seated decay without any indulgence. I dearly wished that it would keep going without hesitation or deviation, in a spirit of purity forever.
Naguib Mahfouz
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The writer interweaves a story with his own doubts, questions, and values. That is art.
Naguib Mahfouz
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If life has no meaning, why don't we create a meaning for it?
Naguib Mahfouz
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We are passing through a very sensitive time, and on the whole, this country is facing very big problems.
Naguib Mahfouz
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We are like a woman with a difficult pregnancy. We have to rebuild the social classes in Egypt, and we must change the way things were.
Naguib Mahfouz
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You know what I'm afraid of? That God is sick of us.
Naguib Mahfouz
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As the tension eases, we must look in the direction of agriculture, industry and education as our final goals, and toward democracy under Mr Mubarak.
Naguib Mahfouz
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Visit me once each year, for it's wrong to abandon people forever.
Naguib Mahfouz