When I am in Egypt, I am phoned because I am listed in the medical directory under "Mental Health and Psychiatry." And of course, I see very few people, because I give much more time to writing. So I cannot say that I really stopped medicine, but I practice medicine - or psychiatry - in a very different way. In an artistic way!

Nawal El Saadawi

Categorized in : Writing Practice Egypt

Women are half the society. You cannot have a revolution without women. You cannot have democracy without women. You cannot have equality without women. You can't have anything without women.

Nawal El Saadawi

revolution democracy half

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

Nawal El Saadawi

intelligent stupid beautiful

Danger has been a part of my life ever since I picked up a pen and wrote. Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies.

Nawal El Saadawi

danger lying world

The trilogy composed of politics, religion and sex is the most sensitive of all issues in any society.

Nawal El Saadawi

issues sex religion

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.

Nawal El Saadawi

our-world integrity men

When we live in a world that is very unjust, you have to be a dissident.

Nawal El Saadawi

humanitarian unjust world

To be creative means to connect. It's to abolish the gap between the body, the mind and the soul, between science and art, between fiction and nonfiction.

Nawal El Saadawi

creative-nonfiction mean art

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

Nawal El Saadawi

want

moral codes and standards in our societies very rarely apply to all people equally. This is the most damning proof of how immoral such codes and standards really are.

Nawal El Saadawi

morality our-society people

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.

Nawal El Saadawi

powerful men way

To have arrived at the truth means that one no longer fears death. For death and truth are similar in that they both require a great courage if one wishes to face them.

Nawal El Saadawi

truth wish mean

Prostitution means sexual intercourse between a man and a woman aimed at satisfying the man's sexual and the woman's economic needs. It is obvious that sexual needs, even in a male dominated system, are not as urgent and important as economic needs which, if not satisfied, lead to disease and death. Yet society considers the woman's economic need as less vital than the man's sexual one.

Nawal El Saadawi

disease-and-death men mean

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.

Nawal El Saadawi

desire men hands

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.

Nawal El Saadawi

blow men fall

If you are creative, you must be dissident.

Nawal El Saadawi

dissidents creative ifs

Motherhood goes back in history to a time when a father had no way of knowing his children. Fatherhood only became known when class patriarchal society had established itself and imposed monogamous marriage on women. Motherhood is like sun and rain and plants, a quality and product of nature which does not require laws or systems in order to exist.

Nawal El Saadawi

rain father children

We never know the reality of things: we see only what we are aware of. It is our consciousness that determines the shape of the world around us -- its size, motion and meaning.

Nawal El Saadawi

shapes reality world

Here the oppression of women is very subtle. If we take female circumcision, the excision of the clitoris, it is done physically in Egypt. But here it is done psychologically and by education. So even if women have the clitoris, the clitoris was banned; it was removed by Freudian theory and by the mainstream culture.

Nawal El Saadawi

mainstream-culture egypt female

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

Nawal El Saadawi

honest creative mean

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

Nawal El Saadawi

savages truth-is independent