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A modern civilization is only possible when it is accepted that singular beings exist and express themselves freely.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

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Tahar Ben Jelloun
Age: 76
Born: 1947
Born: December 1
Novelist
Poet
Psychotherapist
Writer
Fes
Morocco
Freely
Express
Accepted
Exist
Beings
Civilization
Modern
Possible
Singular

More quotes by Tahar Ben Jelloun

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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.
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I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.
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I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.
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Most of those who died did not die of hunger but of hatred. Feeling hatred diminishes you. It eats at your from within and attacks the immune system. When you have hatred inside you, it always crushes you in the end.
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There is an important erotic element in A Thousand and One Nights, which is one of the keys to understanding the Orient.
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Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.
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In Morocco, it's possible to see the Atlantic and the Mediterranean at the same time.
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I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice, exploitation, humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.
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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.
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Religion has to stay in the heart, not in politics. It is private.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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I don't feel guilty about expressing myself in French nor do I feel that I am continuing the work of the colonizers.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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I am a Moroccan writer of French expression.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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Egypt has suffered more ordeals than the other countries to get where it is.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.
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It is impossible to disregard such an important medium as television. We should know how to use it, learn to work in it and express new values in it.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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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
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This universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one's mother tongue.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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I do not use the language of my people. I can take liberties with certain themes which the Arabic language would not allow me to take.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets.
Tahar Ben Jelloun