Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.
Hisham Matar
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 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.
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.
Dreams have consequences.
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.
Civil war is a national crisis and also a private trauma: We suffer it collectively and in isolation.
Ivan Turgenev's novella 'First Love' is one of the most perfect things ever written.
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.
My earliest memory of books is not of reading but of being read to. I spent hours listening, watching the face of the person reading aloud to me.
My father believed in armed struggle.
I think, ultimately, I am a sensualist and an aesthete.
I've never been particularly interested in genre distinctions. They seem to me more useful to a librarian than to a writer.
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.
The cost of Colonel Gaddafi's rule on Libyan society is incalculable.
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.
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.
There are two voices: the first says write; the second hardly speaks, but I know what he wants. And if I let him, nothing would get done. He hovers at the edges.
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.
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.
All great art allows us this: a glimpse across the limits of our self.
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.
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.
I used to be a keen rider. Sometimes I could sense what a horse liked or preferred to do.
There's something very bizarre about having a father who has disappeared. It's very hard to articulate.
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.
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.
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.
From my family alone, Qaddafi had imprisoned five men.
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.
My father, the political dissident Jaballa Matar, disappeared from his home in Cairo in March 1990.
I admire Turgenev, Camus, Proust and Shakespeare, but I've also learnt a lot about writing from composers and artists.
Language is not just a code; you are writing into its history, into its tides.
I get a lot of energy from making things up, which is why I feel I'm a novelist.
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.
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.
In the end, madness is worse than injustice, and justice far sweeter than freedom.
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.
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.
My family settled in Cairo in 1980. I was nine. I missed Libya terribly, but I also took to Cairo. I perfected the accent. People assumed I was Egyptian.
It is evident that Qaddafi is mentally unwell. Like Richard III, he has barricaded himself within lies.
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.
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 laws of the lowly gangster govern Qaddafi and his sons.
Architecture remains a passion and a subject I'm very interested in. I learned a great deal from studying it and working in it.
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 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.
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.'
Great writing fills me with hopeful enthusiasm and never envy.
Libyans are deeply unsettled by Gaddafi and his regime's careless contempt for human life. The dictatorship is willing to employ any methods necessary to remain in power.
