On writing

''GREAT writers often seem to haunt their cities. Joyce and Kafka remain ghostly figures on the streets of Dublin and Prague, and the elfin presence of Borges is still glimpsed, through cigarette smoke and tango sweat, in the cafés of Buenos Aires. In the ancient city of Cairo, it is Naguib Mahfouz who does the haunting.''

I have read many books on writing. None has moved me to make writing my life vocation. But, great writing like this inspires. Words form lines that speak of great minds and deliver the wretched, set the oppressed free and spur people to act on their grand plans.

These little words moved me this afternoon in a secluded corner of a crowded foodcourt. Smoke and noise blocked out a person's right to her solitary lunch break, but not her chance to meet Naguib Mahfouz on pages of words that sprung from another writer in love.

They tell me of him and his characters in his books: ordinary people living in his beloved city struggling with upholding personal dignity in a place of pervasive poverty and how they live, divided on tradition and modernity.

``He enriched an Arabic literature which, while perhaps incomparable for its poetry, was then still largely innocent of the fully formed imaginary world of the novel.''

``Writing was a joy to him. He loved the sheer act of it, writing every morning and always in longhand. This made the worst drama of his own life particularly cruel. In his 83rd year, a knife-wielding religious fanatic stabbed him in the neck. The would-be killer—inspired, it seems, by clerical objections to allegorical characters in one of Mr Mahfouz's books—failed in his mission, but nerve damage stopped Mr Mahfouz writing for five years.''

He said, a writer should write at least something anything everyday, a obituary written and published in New York Times.

I want to write.