Quotes By Tahar Ben Jelloun

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.

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.

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.

People must insist on the right to say no, to be alone, to stand out from the herd. Creative artists can say all this in their own way and in their own field, by hard, rigorous work.

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

Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.

This universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one's mother tongue.

Be vigilant, for nothing one achieves lasts forever.

The intellectual, the man of thought, doubt and analysis, should give the best of himself.

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

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.

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

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

My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.

We must stop posing as victims of the West and behaving negatively towards the West. We must participate with the West on an equal footing in the reconstruction of the world.

It is through accepting other people in our own countries that we shall come to respect our neighbours and be respected in our turn.

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

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.