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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
Accepted
Exist
Beings
Civilization
Modern
Possible
Singular
Freely
Express

More quotes by Tahar Ben Jelloun

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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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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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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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Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.
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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.
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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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This universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one's mother tongue.
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Religion has to stay in the heart, not in politics. It is private.
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My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.
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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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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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Egypt has suffered more ordeals than the other countries to get where it is.
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In Morocco, it's possible to see the Atlantic and the Mediterranean at the same time.
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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 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.
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At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets.
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I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.
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Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.
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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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I am a Moroccan writer of French expression.
Tahar Ben Jelloun