Tahar Ben Jelloun Quotes

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

I really like acting in French. It's actually quite different for me, from acting in English. It's fun acting in a foreign language. You're liberated or freed from preconceptions.

It's liberating to perform in another language. There are some subjects I would never talk about in French, where they see me as a public figure, that I talk about in English.

I always tell students that writing a poem and publishing it are two quite separate things, and you should write what you have to write, and if you're afraid it's going to upset someone, don't publish it.

I don't feel restricted by the language: I feel more free.

I came here when I was almost 22. I'm perfectly bilingual, but I'm never going to sound like Sandra Bullock.

Sometimes I feel I can't quite master my written and spoken Spanish, because I'm too much a student of English. I would need another lifetime to learn it.

All artists are now free to express their own personality.

When I go home to England, my friends all make fun of me for sounding American.

I don't think you can write according to a set of rules and laws; every writer is so different.

If I hadn't left South Africa, I felt I was at risk of being pigeonholed. I looked around and saw actors who, 10 to 15 years into their careers, were still playing stereotypical Afrikaans characters, stereotyped Indian characters. That was not something that I wanted for myself.

I will never be a fan of any kind of political correctness: I think it's instant death to creativity.

It was important that I got my own voice out there in the world. I'd used it on other people's films, collaborated, and I thought, 'You know, I can do this myself.' That was more important than anything else.

Indian writers have appropriated English as an Indian language, and that gives a certain freshness to the way we write.

When you work in a different language you are not so attached to the words.

I don't buy into the idea that an Irish writer should write about Ireland, or a gay writer should write about being gay.

When people speak their own language you get a much better sense of who they are.

That's so different in Hong Kong when I'm using my own mother language, I can treat the line in one thousand different ways, with many different reactions.

Doing my own album provided me the opportunity to say whatever I wanted.

It would, of course, be hopeless to attempt to crowd into an international language all those local overtones of meaning which are so dear to the heart of the nationalist.

I've always envied people who compose music or paint, because they don't have to be bothered with the sort of crude mess that language normally is, in everyday life and in the way we use it.

If I have to pretend to be anything else than French, then I know it's work for me. It's not that it scares me, but it's work. I cannot just pop up on the set and say 'Okay, today I'm Italian!'

I just don't consider myself to be, you know, an American actor. I don't want that life.

White America don't get to dictate how me and Shaq talk to each other.

I realize that the wish to write in a new language derives from a kind of desperation.