 My father was a writer and writing was my only dream when I was kid and I had writing in our house. I was an only child and I was very attached to my father, so writing was in the air in our house. But you see, you cannot make your living in Egypt through fiction writing. It is impossible. Many writers are professional writers and they have absolutely the right to live from writing. Copyrights are a very, very important thing in Egypt and we have been suffering, it's very important for everybody all over the world, but we have been suffering in Egypt from a terrible dictatorship. So the story was the following. You write, you don't have copyrights, your works are stolen, you cannot make your living from writing. That was part of my problem in Egypt during the 90s because I had to get published through the government for political reasons and for corruption reasons as well. I was refused to be published three times and it was, every time I was refused, I had very good reviews, but I was a non-writer without readers, you see, because people couldn't find my work, my book. And I finished this novel and this novel was called The Yakubian Building. So I gave it to, it was a phenomena, you see, from the very first week it was a phenomena, it was sold everywhere and it changed my life, this success. It is really very interesting because I was fighting, I was fighting to get published by the government to get a kind of publication of 3,000 copies and I would have been very happy if that happened. But now I am celebrating one million copies of my work, you see, the publisher is your window. I mean, if you don't have a publisher, it means that all what you write is not going to be transmitted to the readers and publishing is very important. My works have been translated to 34 languages. It means that you just have to write and you don't worry about any other thing, he is going to take care. Writing is a very, very difficult profession. There is no formula to write, there is no one single formula to write fiction. I mean, every factual writer should discover his own way. It is very hard to learn how to write, how to have your style. Writing is like a princess in a castle and you must really prove your love. You must prove your love and then in the end she is going to open the door. I wake up very early, I wake up 6 am, 6 days a week and I write from 6.30, 6.30, I am always on my desk to write. I began with having files for every character. This is the most important thing. I make files for every character and in the file I put details about the character. Details which could be very little details. Like if she is a lady, how does she look? How is she dressed? Does she smoke or doesn't smoke? What kind of cigarettes counts? You see, why? Because I do that to try to initiate life in the character in my imagination. At some point I will feel that these characters are no more imaginary. They do exist. And then I begin writing and then at some point, which is really a very mysterious thing, but this is exactly what happens is that at some point I lose control of my characters. My characters become independent and instead of writing what they should do, I try to follow them. Now they decide for themselves and on the screen of my imagination I follow them and I write what I see, what they are doing. And this gives an unbelievable pleasure. The most important thing to inspire a writer is to keep yourself honest and clean. You see, Chigivara said once, Honor means that you say always what you think and you do always what you say. And I believe that this is very, very good because we are inspired to write because there is a kind of clean screen invisible in our heart. And this is very important in literature. Greek literature means that we don't judge people who try to understand them. And if you do that in literature, really we become much better human beings.