Quotes from Hisham Matar

Like most dictators, Col Gaddafi detests the metropolis. His vision of Libya is a kind of Bedouin romantic medievalism, suspicious of universities, theatres, galleries and cafes, and so monitors the cities' inhabitants with paranoid suspicion.

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

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 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.

I get a lot of energy from making things up, which is why I feel I'm a novelist.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

Libyans are deeply unsettled by Gaddafi and his regime's careless contempt for human life. The dictatorship is willing to employ any methods necessary to remain in power.

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.

Whenever I was encouraged by my elders to pick up a book, I was often told, 'Read so as to know the world.' And it is true; books have invited me into different countries, states of mind, social conditions and historical epochs; they have offered me a place at the most unusual gatherings.

Gaddafi tried to give a masterclass to men like the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, on how to crush a civilian uprising.

When a dictatorship imprisons someone or makes them disappear, it's actually a very strategic move. We forget that. It's not as senseless as it seems. It's a way to silence someone, but also it's a way to silence their family as well, out of fear, and society by extension.

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

My parents were fairly laid-back, but there were certain things about which they were very strict. My brother and I were told never to turn away a person in need. And it didn't matter what we thought of their motives, whether they were truly in need or not.

He had given me something priceless: namely, his confidence. I am grateful I was forced to make my own way. His disappearance did put me in need and make my future uncertain, but it turns out need and uncertainty can be excellent teachers.

And I suppose that is what we want from our mothers: to maintain the world and, even if it is a lie, to proceed as though the world could be maintained. Whereas my father was obsessed with the past and the future, with returning to and remaking Libya, my mother was devoted to the present. For this reason, she was the truly radical force in my adolescence.

It's one thing not to fear death, another to sing under its sword.

I had always regarded Manhattan the way an orphan might think of the mother who had laid him on the doorstep of a mosque: it meant nothing to me but also everything.

Those who would later lament Seif and his father's (Qaddafi) regime are like a man who looks at the ashes and says, "I much prefer the fire

I didn't know you were going to be so beautiful, fill my heart..

Suddenly he is beside me. I do not know how, but we are the same age. There is something tragic about this fact.

The past, like a severed limb, tried to fix itself onto the body of the present.

One's nature is like a mountain

The simple rule was never to refuse any one or thing in need. "It's not your job to read their hearts," he once told me after I claimed, with shameful certainty, that begging was a profession. "Your duty is not to doubt but to give. And don't ask questions at the door. Allow them only to tell you what they came for after they've had tea and something to eat.

Encountering our dialect during those years was always disconcerting, provoking in me, and with equal force, both fear and longing.