Quotes from Nawal El Saadawi

To me, 'beauty' means to be natural, creative, honest - to say the truth.

But I feel that you, in particular, are a person who cannot live without love." "Yet I am living without love." "Then you are either living a lie or not living at all.

They said, "You are a savage and dangerous woman." I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.

Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies.

Whenever I go to New York or any European country, they say: 'Nawal, why don't you get a facelift?' I tell them, 'I am proud of my wrinkles. Every wrinkle on my face tells the story of my life. Why should I hide my age?'

When you are intelligent and beautiful you face a lot of problems. If you are beautiful and stupid then it's easy.

Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.

They said, "You are a savage and dangerous woman." I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.

Yet not for a single moment did I have any doubts about my own integrity and honour as a woman. I knew that my profession had been invented by men, and that men were in control of both our worlds, the one on earth, and the one in heaven. That men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another.

All the men I did get to know, every single man of them, has filled me with but one desire: to lift my hand and bring it smashing down on his face.

She is free to do what she wants, and free not to do it.

I have triumphed over both life and death because I no longer desire to live, nor do I any longer fear to die.

Everybody has to die, Firdaus. I will die, and you will die. The important thing is how to live until you die.

Men impose deception on women and punish them for being deceived, force them down to the lowest level and punish them for falling so low, bind them in marriage and then chastise them with menial service for life, or insults, or blows.

If you are creative, you must be dissident.

My skin is soft, but my heart is cruel, and my bite is deadly.

Solidarity between women can be a powerful force of change, and can influence future development in ways favourable not only to women but also to men.

Love has made me a different person. It has made the world beautiful.

I knew I hated him as only a woman can hate a man, as only a slave can hate his master.

Memory is never complete. There are always parts of it that time has amputated. Writing is a way of retrieving them, of bringing the missing parts back to it, of making it more holistic.

Everybody has to die. I prefer to die for a crime I have committed rather than to die for one of the crimes which you have committed.

Revolutionary men with principles were not really different from the rest. They used their cleverness to get, in return for principles, what other men buy with their money.

How many were the years of my life that went by before my body, and my self became really mine, to do with them as I wished? How many were the years of my life that were lost before I tore my body and my self away from the people who held me in their grasp since the very first day?

Interviewer: What would you say to a woman in this country who assumes she is no longer oppressed, who believes women's liberation has been achieved? el Saadawi: Well I would think she is blind. Like many people who are blind to gender problems, to class problems, to international problems. She's blind to what's happening to her.