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

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

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

" 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. "

" Audacity, hope, courage - the Libyans have these in abundance. But all those boring little things - like organization, building a committee - is hard; making decisions and moving ahead is hard. "

" 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. "

" My father believed in armed struggle. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Over the centuries, close-knit tribes have played an important part in the cohesion of Libyan society. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" The Arab Spring is a powerful and compelling response not only to an age of tyranny but also to the remnant chains of imperial influence. "

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

" Living in hope is a really terrible thing. "

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

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

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

" I used to be a keen rider. Sometimes I could sense what a horse liked or preferred to do. "

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

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

" I think, ultimately, I am a sensualist and an aesthete. "