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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Hisham Matar

Place

Singing

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

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

Hisham Matar

Been

Never

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

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

" My best hope is that Libya turns into a peaceful, sensible country that has all the things my father and lots of others have been calling for: independence of the courts and press, a protected and democratic constitution, with different parties involved in a healthy and open debate. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

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

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

Hisham Matar

Construction

I Am

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

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

" Whenever I was encouraged by my elders to pick up a book, I was often told, 'Read so as to know the world.' And it is true; books have invited me into different countries, states of mind, social conditions and historical epochs; they have offered me a place at the most unusual gatherings. "

Hisham Matar

Book

Mind

" 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 Qaddafis, father and sons, speak the grammar of dictatorship: threats and bribery. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Hisham Matar

Place

Revolution

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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