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

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" 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. "

" Living in hope is a really terrible thing. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Throughout my entire life, I have lived in the shadow of the dictatorship. It denied me safety and security. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" We need a father to rage against. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My father believed in armed struggle. "

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

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

" 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. "

" Architecture remains a passion and a subject I'm very interested in. I learned a great deal from studying it and working in it. "

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

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

" 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. "