Top 102 Quotes & Sayings by Hisham Matar - Page 2

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.

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.

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

I ultimately write for myself and the people I love.

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.

Audacity, hope, courage - the Libyans have these in abundance. But all those boring little things - like organization, building a committee - is hard; making decisions and moving ahead is hard.

I've very aware of my rootlessness.

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

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

Political dictatorships take possession not just of money and belongings but of narrative.

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

I hope and pray that I'll be one of those fortunate people who have many, many books to write. I don't begrudge writing. I love the whole thing!

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

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

My work is my shelter, particularly in these moments when things are happening fast.

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

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

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

Living in hope is a really terrible thing.

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

From my family alone, Qaddafi had imprisoned five men.

My father believed in armed struggle.

Nothing is more acceptable than what we are born into.

Books written out of fire give me a great deal of pleasure. You get the sense that the world for these writers could not have continued if the book hadn't been written. When you come across a book like that it is a privilege.

It is sometimes hard to escape the belief that history exists against the artist.

When I first began writing In the Country of Men all I had was the voice of the protagonist. He intrigued me and my desire to want to know him and his world became almost compulsive.

The three things that help writing the most are living, writing, and reading. In that order.

I wanted to wear her as you would a piece of clothing, to fold into her ribs, be a stone in her mouth.

Grief loves the hollow; all it wants is to hear its own echo.

There and then, sitting beside her and within the strength of my adoration, I felt invincible.

Dreams have consequences. There is no turning back. 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. Its temperament is desperate. It is a tormented response to the past, to all that has happened, the recalled and unrecalled injustices - for the memory of a revolution reaches much further back than the memory of its protagonists.

I am of the firm opinion that no one should tell writers what to do, or what to write, or how to write.

Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih, is an eloquent and restrained portrait of one man's exile. It is a rare narrative in that it charts a life divided between England and Sudan. Without a doubt it is one of the finest Arabic novels of the 20th century, and Denys Johnson-Davies' translationdoes the original justice.