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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: 77
Born: 1947
Born: December 1
Novelist
Poet
Psychotherapist
Writer
Fes
Morocco
Beings
Civilization
Modern
Possible
Singular
Freely
Express
Accepted
Exist

More quotes by Tahar Ben Jelloun

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Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.
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In Morocco, it's possible to see the Atlantic and the Mediterranean at the same time.
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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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What have we achieved since the end of the Second World War? We have allowed petty, bourgeois regimes in which everything is average, mediocre.
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Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.
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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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At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets.
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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I am a Moroccan writer of French expression.
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.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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New ideas should confront old ideas. We must refer to the example of Europe. People have fought to make Europe what it is today. Freedom is not something that is served up on a plate.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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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.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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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.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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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