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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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Tahar Ben Jelloun
Age: 76
Born: 1947
Born: December 1
Novelist
Poet
Psychotherapist
Writer
Fes
Morocco
Would
Repression
Bullets
Shoot
Discovered
Injustice
Army
Students
Real

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Egypt has suffered more ordeals than the other countries to get where it is.
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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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I am a Moroccan writer of French expression.
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Our steps invent the path as we proceed behind us they leave no trace, only the void. So we shall always look ahead and trust our feet. They will take us as far as our minds will go... -- 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.
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My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.
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A modern civilization is only possible when it is accepted that singular beings exist and express themselves freely.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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This universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one's mother tongue.
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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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Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.
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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.
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