I had a number of very strong personalities in my family. My father was a concert flutist, the solo flute for Toscanini. That was an unusual profession for a kid to have as his father. He would dress up in a tuxedo. A concert musician has to practice a lot, and my earliest memories are of that. He was a great musician, very knowledgeable, and he used to tell us the stories of the operas, and all about the composers. He had a lot of knowledge, and he would make a point of telling us about it. I had an older brother who was five years older than me. He was a very successful student, a very handsome kid. Having an older brother by that many years was really an edge that I had. I had an older brother who would protect me. He was a very sensitive and talented boy, and he became interested in literature. So at the same time that I had all this information from my father, I also had a brother who was giving me books at a young age that I would not normally have run into. Brave New World, of course, which was fun, because it was sort of science fiction. As a kid, he was showing me books by James Joyce, and André Gide. So I was really stimulated at a younger age than I normally would have been exposed to that kind of thing.

The person that inspired me the most was Judah Folkman. He was the man that I worked with when I was a postdoctoral fellow. He was really an inspirational person for a variety of reasons. One, he was a big thinker, and lots of people told him that his ideas wouldn’t work or that they were impossible. He persevered in spite of that, and did very, very well. And secondly, he was very encouraging, very sort of like positive reinforcement, in terms of how he would deal with me and others. So I would say he certainly had a pivotal influence on my career when I was a postdoctoral fellow.

There were definitely teachers who made a huge impact. I think about a woman whose name was Mrs. Fish who was my seventh grade English Language Arts teacher. What I remember about her was just how hard she pushed. I thought I was a perfectly strong student at this point, but she just pushed everyone to their limits. That was very instrumental for me. In fact, all the teachers I remember had that same thing: they just had such high expectations and wouldn’t stop pushing. I think she just conveyed the idea that good wasn’t good enough, and I think the skill development and critical thinking skills that that year developed were also instrumental. But I also think, I don’t know, there’s something about that year that probably instilled within me that ethic that you just have to keep pushing to get better and better, and that if you work hard enough it will pay off.

My father was a lawyer. My mother was a homemaker. My father was president of the Egyptian Bar Association. He was involved very much during the Nasser era — which was one of the most repressive eras in Egyptian history — in fighting for democracy, fighting for human rights, and I think that to a lot of extent shaped my view as to what I wanted to do in the future. I wanted to have a world where people are free to express their views, to have freedom of worship, to have freedom from want, and I saw poverty in Egypt when I grew up. To me, freedom, in the larger sense — to be able to speak, to worship, free from want, free from fear — I think it was a key as to what I thought I would like to do when I grow up.

That’s a very good question. I think I’m a very lazy writer and by that I mean that I do not battle, I don’t struggle too hard against it. If I have difficulties in the writing, I just go and do other things. I don’t feel a compulsion to write. Of course, when I start writing then it becomes a compulsive activity, because I’ve begun something and I want to continue, want to finish it. … I know there are other writers who sit down religiously every morning, they take their espresso, they put a clean sheet of paper there and they sit looking at that paper until they’ve finished or covered at least a number of those pages. No, I’m not like that. I have to be ready. It has to gestate it for quite a while and then it’s ready to burst forth.

Writing became a therapy. First of all, it meant I was reconstructing my own existence. It was also an act of defiance. I wasn’t supposed to write. ... I evolved all kinds of mental exercises, even went back to those subjects which I said I hated in school, in particular mathematics. ... You know, anything to keep the mind alive.

Yes, I do. I do, but I were part company with certain schools of writers that I do not believe that it is necessarily the duty of the writer. I don’t believe that. If a writer is true to his vocation, to his or her vocation, the very process of creativity enlarges these human horizons. It provides insights, even when you’re not writing, when your writing’s not dealing with a concrete political situation.

I just say, “Follow your instincts.” Don’t feel you have to follow the paths of others, because you may not be temperamentally fitted for it. And so you’ll just harm yourself and your cause and others. But just follow your instinct, and don’t ever pretend to be what you’re not.