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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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Tahar Ben Jelloun
Age: 76
Born: 1947
Born: December 1
Novelist
Poet
Psychotherapist
Writer
Fes
Morocco
States
Suspended
Live
Pits
Without
Arab
Mediocrity
Touching
International
Generalized
Bottom
Intellectuals
State
Stature

More quotes by Tahar Ben Jelloun

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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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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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I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.
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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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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.
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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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At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets.
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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 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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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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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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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 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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I am a Moroccan writer of French expression.
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Egypt has suffered more ordeals than the other countries to get where it is.
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Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.
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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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