Quote

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.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

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Tahar Ben Jelloun
Age: 76
Born: 1947
Born: December 1
Novelist
Poet
Psychotherapist
Writer
Fes
Morocco
Voice
Difficult
Intellectuals
Often
Opposition
Keep
Price
Trying
Paid
Going
Courage
Situation
High

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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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My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.
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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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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 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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At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets.
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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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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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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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Religion has to stay in the heart, not in politics. It is private.
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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 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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