Life & Wisdom Quote by Tahar Ben Jelloun

There is a quiet provocation in the word sensibility. Ben Jelloun isn’t claiming a method, a politics, or a canon; he’s claiming a nervous system. Taste here is not a set of rules but an instrument that twitches toward risk. “Steers me” suggests something bodily and involuntary, like a hand drifting to the wheel before the mind supplies an argument. That’s a poet’s way of legitimizing preference without turning it into dogma: the compass is emotional, but it still points.

“Writers who are out on their own” is both aesthetic praise and moral position. It flatters solitude, but it also rejects the safety of schools, trends, and ideological groupings that turn literature into a team sport. The phrase quietly demotes the workshop-friendly, market-calibrated voice. It elevates the writer whose style cannot be easily filed under a movement or a nation-state’s preferred story about itself.

In Ben Jelloun’s orbit - Moroccan, francophone, postcolonial, perpetually translated and categorized - that insistence on aloneness reads as self-defense. When your work is routinely approached as “representative,” the loner stance refuses to be recruited. The subtext is: don’t reduce writers to passports, traumas, or talking points. The best ones slip the net.

It’s also a critique of literary prestige as herd behavior. Awards, syllabi, and cultural institutions love legibility; “out on their own” names the opposite: the strange, unrepeatable, slightly unmarketable. Ben Jelloun frames that not as eccentricity for its own sake, but as the condition for real literary discovery.