Art & Creativity Quote by Naguib Mahfouz

Mahfouz turns writing from a job into a life-support system: if the impulse goes, the person goes. The line sounds melodramatic until you clock the discipline and danger baked into his biography. This is a novelist who spent decades mapping Cairo's alleys and living rooms with the patience of a civil servant, then later became a global symbol of Arabic letters after the Nobel, and still paid a physical price for words when he survived an assassination attempt that damaged his ability to write. In that light, the sentence reads less like romantic posturing and more like a plainspoken vow.

The specific intent is to declare writing as the core of selfhood, not an accessory to it. He doesn't say "if I can't write" but "if the urge... leave me" - the threat is not external censorship or age but internal extinguishing, the terrifying possibility of becoming indifferent. Mahfouz is naming the engine, not the output. Novels can stall; the appetite to make them is what keeps a mind morally and imaginatively awake.

The subtext is also political, in the quiet Mahfouz way. In societies where public speech can be policed, the private insistence on continuing to want to speak is itself defiance. He frames the worst fate as spiritual silence, not death. That inversion gives the line its bite: mortality is manageable; a life without the compulsion to observe, translate, and tell the truth of daily life is the real extinction.