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" I've very aware of my rootlessness. "

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" 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. "

" 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'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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" To me, writing is like singing in the most inappropriate place, singing as beautifully as you can on a bus or in a bank, where people least expect it, and trying to get them to want to listen. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" I sometimes wonder if I would have become a writer if what happened to my father hadn't happened. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Growing up in the Libya of the 1970s, I remember the prevalence of local bands who were as much influenced by Arabic musical traditions as by the Rolling Stones or the Beatles. But the project of 'Arabisation' soon got to them, too, and western musical instruments were declared forbidden as 'instruments of imperialism.' "

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

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