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" As part of the ritual of becoming a man, my maternal uncle, a judge, and his four sons, each older than me, took me deer hunting. "

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" The space where writing happens is a unique space that's hard to define, and when you're kicked out of it because you're travelling or distracted, it seems so elusive and hard to defend because you yourself doubt whether it existed. "

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

" The cost of Colonel Gaddafi's rule on Libyan society is incalculable. "

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

" Great writing fills me with hopeful enthusiasm and never envy. "

" Being my father's son is a kind of privilege. "

" There are two voices: the first says write; the second hardly speaks, but I know what he wants. And if I let him, nothing would get done. He hovers at the edges. "

" I ultimately write for myself and the people I love. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In the same way that Egypt and Libya conspired to 'disappear' my father and silence writers such as Idris Ali, they made me, too, to a far lesser extent, feel punished for speaking out. "

" 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. "

" From my family alone, Qaddafi had imprisoned five men. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Books have shown me horror and beauty. "

" I've very aware of my rootlessness. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" There's something very bizarre about having a father who has disappeared. It's very hard to articulate. "

" 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. "

" In Libya, I did well at school because I was clever. In Egyptian public school, I got the highest marks for the basest of reasons. And in the American school, I struggled. Everything - mathematics, the sciences, pottery, swimming - had to be conducted in a language I hardly knew and that was neither spoken in the streets nor at home. "

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

" 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.' "

" From before I was born, we Arabs have been caught between two forces that, seemingly, cannot be defeated: our ruthless dictators, who oppress and humiliate us, and the cynical western powers, who would rather see us ruled by criminals loyal to them than have democratically elected leaders accountable to us. "

" 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. "