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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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Tahar Ben Jelloun
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: December 1
Novelist
Poet
Psychotherapist
Writer
Fes
Morocco
People
Theme
Allow
Liberty
Language
Use
Certain
Arabic
Take
Themes
Would
Liberties

More quotes by Tahar Ben Jelloun

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My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.
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I am a Moroccan writer of French expression.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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
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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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At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
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Religion has to stay in the heart, not in politics. It is private.
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Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.
Tahar Ben Jelloun