Hisham Matar

“There's always a problem when you write, something you're trying to resolve, and sometimes a view can be inspiring.”

“To be okay with not knowing is a sign of a mature person and a mature society.”

“I admire Turgenev, Camus, Proust and Shakespeare, but I've also learnt a lot about writing from composers and artists.”

“When you've been living in hope for a long time as I have, suddenly you realize that certainty is far more desirable than hope.”

“Nothing makes you feel more stupid than learning a new language. You lose your confidence. You want to disappear. Not be noticed. Say as little as possible.”

“I am terribly interested in the paragraph: the paragraph as an object, the construction, and the possibilities of what a paragraph can do.”

“There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy”

“Nothing we read can import new or foreign feelings that we don't, in one form or another, already possess.”

“I ultimately write for myself and the people I love.”

“My parents left Libya in 1979, escaping political repression, and settled in Cairo. I was nine.”

“I've never been particularly interested in genre distinctions. They seem to me more useful to a librarian than to a writer.”

“The Arab Spring, with all of its failings and failures, exposed the lie that if we are to live, then we must live as slaves. It was an attempt to undermine not only the orthodoxy of dictatorship but also an international political orthodoxy where every activity must be approved by the profit logic of the 'ledger.'”

“I am longing to see Libya rejoin the world as the internationalist Mediterranean country that it was.”

“I used to believe that it was not possible to lose someone I loved without sensing it somehow, without feeling something shift. But it's not true. People can die, sometimes the closest people to us, without us noticing a thing.”

“One's nature is like a mountain”

“Grenfell, the building set on fire with the help of its own face, is a scene of a complex injustice: one that is moral, economic, political, and aesthetic. Not only was the cladding unsafe, it was ugly; not only was it ugly, it was untrue both to the architecture of the building it covered and untrue to its responsibility to human safety.”

“Political dictatorships take possession not just of money and belongings but of narrative.”

“Gaddafi's ability to have survived so long rests on his convenient position in not being committed to a single ideology and his use of violence in such a theatrical way.”

“We have defeated Gaddafi on the battlefield; now we must defeat him in our imagination. We must not allow his legacy to corrupt our dream. Let's keep focused on the true prize: unity, democracy, and the rule of law. Let's not seek revenge; that would diminish our future.”

“I can pinpoint the exact moment when I first began to think about what profession I should go into. It was 1978. I was seven and had just been handed over by the women of my family to the earnest and self-important gatherings of the men. I was no longer the responsibility of my aunts and older female cousins. I was now a man. This was a tragedy.”