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.

Hisham Matar

Thankful Romantic Faith

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

Imagination Ted T

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.

Hisham Matar

Which Whether Were

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.

Hisham Matar

Positive Politics Very

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.

Hisham Matar

Art Uncle UN

Dreams have consequences.

Hisham Matar

Dreams Sequence Ms

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.

Hisham Matar

Power Age Tyranny

Civil war is a national crisis and also a private trauma: We suffer it collectively and in isolation.

Hisham Matar

War Trauma T

Ivan Turgenev's novella 'First Love' is one of the most perfect things ever written.

Hisham Matar

Love Written Van

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.

Hisham Matar

Success Power Great

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.

Hisham Matar

Watching Watch Ten

My father believed in armed struggle.

Hisham Matar

T Struggle Rug

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

Hisham Matar

Ultimately Ultimate Tim

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

Hisham Matar

Art Writer Write

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.

Hisham Matar

Time Hope You

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

Hisham Matar

Society Ya T

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.

Hisham Matar

Women Society Men

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.

Hisham Matar

Peace Independence Hope

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.

Hisham Matar

Write Would Wants

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.

Hisham Matar

Society Fear Family

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.

Hisham Matar

Art Who Ways

All great art allows us this: a glimpse across the limits of our self.

Hisham Matar

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.

Hisham Matar

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.

Hisham Matar

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

Hisham Matar

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

Hisham Matar

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.

Hisham Matar

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.

Hisham Matar

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.

Hisham Matar

From my family alone, Qaddafi had imprisoned five men.

Hisham Matar

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.

Hisham Matar

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

Hisham Matar

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

Hisham Matar

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

Hisham Matar

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

Hisham Matar

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.

Hisham Matar

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.

Hisham Matar

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

Hisham Matar

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.

Hisham Matar

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.

Hisham Matar

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.

Hisham Matar

It is evident that Qaddafi is mentally unwell. Like Richard III, he has barricaded himself within lies.

Hisham Matar

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.

Hisham Matar

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.

Hisham Matar

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

Hisham Matar

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

Hisham Matar

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.

Hisham Matar

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.

Hisham Matar

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.'

Hisham Matar

Great writing fills me with hopeful enthusiasm and never envy.

Hisham Matar

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.

Hisham Matar