Quotes By Tahar Ben Jelloun

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

I am a Moroccan writer of French expression.

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.

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

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

I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.

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