Quotes By Tahar Ben Jelloun
My characters are driven by a passionate desire for justice. They are rebellious and incorruptible.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
My hope is that countries like Morocco will have investment to create work, so people don't have to leave.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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.
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.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
To lead a country, you must periodically hold a national consultation in which people representing different programmes can make a bid for power.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
The intellectual, the man of thought, doubt and analysis, should give the best of himself.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
The mistake we make is to attribute to religions the errors and fanaticism of human beings.
Tahar Ben Jelloun