Daily Inspiration Quote by Naguib Mahfouz

Mahfouz isn’t just confessing a personal habit; he’s drawing a cultural boundary line around what the literary world is supposed to value. In a Western publishing ecosystem that fetishizes the paper trail, early drafts are treated like relics: proof of genius, raw material for dissertations, collectibles for archives. Mahfouz shrugs at that entire economy. “It is simply not part of my culture” sounds polite, but it’s also quietly defiant: a refusal to turn process into product, to let the workshop compete with the work.

The subtext is partly pragmatic. A novelist writing through colonial change, censorship pressures, and the practical limits of space and stability doesn’t necessarily have the luxury of curating a private museum of himself. Preserving drafts assumes time, storage, institutional interest, and a sense that your “becoming” will be historically bankable. Mahfouz implies that expectation is imported.

There’s also a moral aesthetic hiding in the line. Drafts can be read as the author’s “true” self before revision, as if the finished book were a compromised public face. Mahfouz flips that: the finished text is the point; everything else is scaffolding. The remark functions as a defense of artistic privacy and an insistence that literature’s authority should come from what survives in the reader’s hands, not what’s excavated from the writer’s wastebasket. In an era obsessed with behind-the-scenes access, it’s a reminder that mystery can be a principle, not a PR failure.