'The Greece that I knew as a young and aggressive poet has changed. Nevertheless I feel there might be some point in trying to recollect and perhaps recreate a little bit of the Greece which is not finished yet and gone for good, and whose ghost still rises up to afflict me from time to time. 'I would like to recall those golden years and to throw open the many-coloured background of Greece's own history so that the landscape may be evoked before the eyes of the viewer who is not free to touch with his own hands or to feel the beauty of Greece.'

'After 30 years, I return to Egypt to see again places which, either from a literary or a persona) point of view. meant something to me or marked me or moved me. and to see what traces, if any, remain of that extravagantly coloured world I painted in The Alexandria Quartet.'