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" 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. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" My father believed in armed struggle. "

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

" In the same way that Egypt and Libya conspired to 'disappear' my father and silence writers such as Idris Ali, they made me, too, to a far lesser extent, feel punished for speaking out. "

" Dreams have consequences. "

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

" I've very aware of my rootlessness. "

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

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

" Living in hope is a really terrible thing. "

" 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. "

" In Libya, I did well at school because I was clever. In Egyptian public school, I got the highest marks for the basest of reasons. And in the American school, I struggled. Everything - mathematics, the sciences, pottery, swimming - had to be conducted in a language I hardly knew and that was neither spoken in the streets nor at home. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" As part of the ritual of becoming a man, my maternal uncle, a judge, and his four sons, each older than me, took me deer hunting. "

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

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