126 Quotes by Hisham Matar

Nationalism is as thin as a thread, perhaps that's why many feel it must be anxiously guarded

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.

Nothing is more acceptable than what we are born into.

He had given me something priceless: namely, his confidence. I am grateful I was forced to make my own way. His disappearance did put me in need and make my future uncertain, but it turns out need and uncertainty can be excellent teachers.

And I suppose that is what we want from our mothers: to maintain the world and, even if it is a lie, to proceed as though the world could be maintained. Whereas my father was obsessed with the past and the future, with returning to and remaking Libya, my mother was devoted to the present. For this reason, she was the truly radical force in my adolescence.

My father is both dead and alive. I do not have a grammar for him. He is in the past, present and future. Even if I had held his hand, and felt it slacken, as he exhaled his last breath, I would still, I believe, every time I refer to him, pause to search for the right tense. I suspect many men who have buried their fathers feel the same. I am no different. I live, as we all live, in the aftermath.

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.

And I remember this man who never ran out of poems telling me once that knowing a book by heart is like carrying a house inside your chest.

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