Tahar Ben Jelloun Quotes

I'd thought sexuality was instinctive or natural, but it's profoundly linked to inner security and cultural context.

I write about wounds, the eternal treasons of life. It's not very funny, but it's sincere. My commitment is to sincerity.

I read a poem every night, as others read a prayer.

I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.

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.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.

At 21, I discovered repression and injustice. The army would shoot students with real bullets.

An individual voice can be heard in a choir that otherwise sings in unison. This is something that is not excused.

Religion has to stay in the heart, not in politics. It is private.

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.

I have written about the dispossessed, immigrants, the condition of women who do not enjoy the same legal rights as men, the Palestinians who are deprived of their land and condemned to exile.

I don't feel guilty about expressing myself in French; nor do I feel that I am continuing the work of the colonizers.

I am a Moroccan writer of French expression.

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.

Egypt has suffered more ordeals than the other countries to get where it is.

Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.

Be vigilant, for nothing one achieves lasts forever.

A modern civilization is only possible when it is accepted that singular beings exist and express themselves freely.

In Morocco, it's possible to see the Atlantic and the Mediterranean at the same time.

The mistake we make is to attribute to religions the errors and fanaticism of human beings.

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.

I love life in spite of all that mars it. I love friendship, jokes and laughter.

Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl.