Quotes By Tahar Ben Jelloun

My characters are driven by a passionate desire for justice. They are rebellious and incorruptible.

Emigration is no longer a solution; it's a defeat. People are risking death, drowning every day, but they're knocking on doors that are not open.

In the Arab world, there is no link between the cultural habits of peoples and the ways of thinking and creating of modern intellectuals. They are two separate worlds.

My hope is that countries like Morocco will have investment to create work, so people don't have to leave.

Intellectuals try to keep going. But their situation is very difficult. Those who have had the courage to voice their opposition have often paid a very high price.

We have no Arab intellectuals of international stature because we live in a state of generalized mediocrity. We are suspended in the pit without touching the bottom.

What have we achieved since the end of the Second World War? We have allowed petty, bourgeois regimes in which everything is average, mediocre.

For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.

People must insist on the right to say no, to be alone, to stand out from the herd. Creative artists can say all this in their own way and in their own field, by hard, rigorous work.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

Be vigilant, for nothing one achieves lasts forever.

The intellectual, the man of thought, doubt and analysis, should give the best of himself.

To lead a country, you must periodically hold a national consultation in which people representing different programmes can make a bid for power.

The mistake we make is to attribute to religions the errors and fanaticism of human beings.

I love life in spite of all that mars it. I love friendship, jokes and laughter.

I am a Moroccan writer of French expression.

I don't feel guilty about expressing myself in French; nor do I feel that I am continuing the work of the colonizers.

We must stop posing as victims of the West and behaving negatively towards the West. We must participate with the West on an equal footing in the reconstruction of the world.

It is through accepting other people in our own countries that we shall come to respect our neighbours and be respected in our turn.

I have written about the dispossessed, immigrants, the condition of women who do not enjoy the same legal rights as men, the Palestinians who are deprived of their land and condemned to exile.

Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.

At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets.

I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.

There is a gulf between the Arab peoples and Arab intellectuals.

We must have our say, not through violence, aggression or fear. We must speak out calmly and forcefully. We shall only be able to enter the new world era if we agree to engage in dialogue with the other side.

I'd thought sexuality was instinctive or natural, but it's profoundly linked to inner security and cultural context.

The power of the word in Morocco belonged to men and to the authorities. No one asked the point of view of poor people or women.

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

I write about wounds, the eternal treasons of life. It's not very funny, but it's sincere. My commitment is to sincerity.

We do not have many intellectuals who can speak out for us internationally. We have no writers who are recognized, respected and loved outside the Arab world.