Tahar Ben Jelloun
Tahar Ben Jelloun
Tahar Ben Jellounis a Moroccan writer. The entirety of his work is written in French, although his first language is Arabic. He became known for his 1985 novel L’Enfant de Sable. Today he lives in Paris and continues to write. He has been short-listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth1 December 1944
CountryFrance
artist people creative
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.
touching mediocrity pits
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.
bedtime steers sensibility
My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.
crush hatred feelings
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.
world needs injustice
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.
heart
Religion has to stay in the heart, not in politics. It is private.
firsts emotion
Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.
guests language poet
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.
mistake umpires errors
The mistake we make is to attribute to religions the errors and fanaticism of human beings.
country people morocco
My hope is that countries like Morocco will have investment to create work, so people don't have to leave.