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

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" 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. "

" Dreams have consequences. "

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

" My earliest memory of books is not of reading but of being read to. I spent hours listening, watching the face of the person reading aloud to me. "

" It is easy to underestimate the demands of an open heart. "

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

" I am, by instinct, wary of revolutions. The gathering of the masses fills me with trepidation. "

" 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. "

" Living in hope is a really terrible thing. "

" 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. "

" Books have shown me horror and beauty. "

" My father, the political dissident Jaballa Matar, disappeared from his home in Cairo in March 1990. "

" My work is my shelter, particularly in these moments when things are happening fast. "

" Civil war is a national crisis and also a private trauma: We suffer it collectively and in isolation. "

" I lost my father when I was 19, so the majority of my life has been under this cloud, and I have been full of the intention to find out what happened. "

" 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. "

" One of the dark truths about dictators - and it applies to Gaddafi - is that on some level, they love their people. But it is a strange love. It says, 'I love you for me; I don't love you for you.' That rhymes with a certain kind of Libyan father who was always certain about what was good for those around him. Those fathers lose in the end. "

" I don't believe people are interested in dates and facts. I don't think it is interesting to say what it is to be this person or that, but I do believe it is entertaining and perhaps even of value to express how it is to be that person. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Turgenev's achievement lies in how he succeeded, in spite of himself, his country, and his time, in exempting his work from public duty. This has given it that unnameable quality that makes every sentence true, every silence trustworthy. "

" 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 frustrations of prison life, which is also one of its intended consequences, is that the prisoner is made ineffective. He is unable to be of much use. The aim is to render him powerless. "

" We need a father to rage against. "

" For an overwhelming majority of my life, my country has been a source of pain, fear, and embarrassment. "

" Making something of loss is, on some level, satisfying. "

" 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. "