Quotes from Hisham Matar

I've always said - I've always said I'm not, by temperament, a romantic about revolutions or given to revolutions. I've always thought that they are not the ideal way to change.

Ivan Turgenev's novella 'First Love' is one of the most perfect things ever written.

A revolution is not a painless march to the gates of freedom and justice. It is a struggle between rage and hope, between the temptation to destroy and the desire to build.

There is a tendency to over-exaggerate and over-romanticise the place of a writer in a revolution. That bothers me. I think it's inappropriate.

Living in hope is a really terrible thing.

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

My family settled in Cairo in 1980. I was nine. I missed Libya terribly, but I also took to Cairo. I perfected the accent. People assumed I was Egyptian.

One of the reasons why Gadafy's dictatorship has managed to remain in power for so long is not just because it has shown itself to be able to exact a great deal of violence, both psychological and physical, on its people, but because it has been very successful at imposing a narrative, a story.

In 2006, I published my first novel, 'In the Country of Men.' The publication of the book gave me a bigger platform to speak about my father's abduction and Libya's human-rights record.

As a young boy in Libya, it was hard to escape the conclusion that the women were the most feeling and most functional part of society.

The romantic idea of the penniless writer is false. It's terrible. I hated being in debt. I hated the anxiety of not knowing whether we could pay our rent that month. Thankfully, I had a wife who was very supportive and had faith and shared my madness.

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 need a father to rage against.

The laws of the lowly gangster govern Qaddafi and his sons.

All great art allows us this: a glimpse across the limits of our self.

The Qaddafis, father and sons, speak the grammar of dictatorship: threats and bribery.

Language is not just a code; you are writing into its history, into its tides.

Great writing fills me with hopeful enthusiasm and never envy.

In the end, madness is worse than injustice, and justice far sweeter than freedom.

When I was 12 years old, living in Cairo, my parents enrolled me in the American school. Most of the Americans there appeared oddly stifled, determined to remain, if not physically then sentimentally, back in the United States.

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

I've never thought of myself in terms of an identity. I'm always baffled when I encounter someone who gives the impression about being confident about a particular defined identity.

From my family alone, Qaddafi had imprisoned five men.

I think my generation's inability to speak in absolute terms when it comes to politics is a very positive thing; it's made us more nuanced, made us more complex.