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" 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. "

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" When I'm writing, my mood is very good - and I love life. "

" 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. "

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

" I don't remember a time when words were not dangerous. "

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

" We got rid of Muammar Gaddafi. I never thought I would be able to write these words. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I admire Turgenev, Camus, Proust and Shakespeare, but I've also learnt a lot about writing from composers and artists. "

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

" 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. "

" Switching languages is a form of conversion. And like all conversions, whether it's judged a failure or a success, it excites the desire to leave, go elsewhere, adopt a new language and start all over again. It also means that a conscious effort is demanded to remain still. "

" 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. "

" Some of the most powerful memories are those when you are very, very young. Adult life is seen through the reflection of complex, rational thought. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Dreams have consequences. "

" 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. "

" Political dictatorships take possession not just of money and belongings but of narrative. "

" Living in hope is a really terrible thing. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "