Quotes from Tahar Ben Jelloun

My hope is that countries like Morocco will have investment to create work, so people don't have to leave.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.

The world does not look to us in the Arab world out of a healthy desire for knowledge.

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.

Be vigilant, for nothing one achieves lasts forever.

We must have our say, not through violence, aggression or fear. We must speak out calmly and forcefully. We shall only be able to enter the new world era if we agree to engage in dialogue with the other side.

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.

Man is more noble dead than alive, because in returning to the earth he becomes earth, and nothing is nobler than the earth that entombs us, closes our eyes, and blossoms in a beautiful eterneity.

My characters are driven by a passionate desire for justice. They are rebellious and incorruptible.