Quotes By Tahar Ben Jelloun

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.

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.

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.

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.

What have we achieved since the end of the Second World War? We have allowed petty, bourgeois regimes in which everything is average, mediocre.

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

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

Be vigilant, for nothing one achieves lasts forever.

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

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.

To lead a country, you must periodically hold a national consultation in which people representing different programmes can make a bid for power.

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

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.

I am a Moroccan writer of French expression.

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.