126 Quotes by Hisham Matar

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

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

My father believed in armed struggle.

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

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.

From my family alone, Qaddafi had imprisoned five men.

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.

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

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.'