Top 48 Quotes by Tahar Ben Jelloun

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

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

There is a gulf between the Arab peoples and Arab intellectuals.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I liked Sartre's views but not his writing.

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.