Hisham Matar quotes - page 3

I think, ultimately, I am a sensualist and an aesthete. (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. View quote
Hisham Matar
Civil war is a national crisis and also a private trauma: We suffer it collectively and in isolation. View quote
Hisham Matar
Great writing fills me with hopeful enthusiasm and never envy. View quote
Hisham Matar
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. View quote
Hisham Matar
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. View quote
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.' View quote
Hisham Matar
I am, by instinct, wary of revolutions. The gathering of the masses fills me with trepidation. View quote
Hisham Matar
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. View quote
Hisham Matar
The cost of Colonel Gaddafi's rule on Libyan society is incalculable. View quote
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)
We got rid of Muammar Gaddafi. I never thought I would be able to write these words. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Hisham Matar
Nothing we read can import new or foreign feelings that we don't, in one form or another, already possess. View quote
Hisham Matar
Premeditated details arrive, when you're writing, and my instinct is always to reach for the nearest weapon. View quote
Hisham Matar
I think of novelists that I really return to and admire, you can almost sense that the book is somehow ahead of them, just a little bit ahead of them, no? You could write from the front: you could pull the book; there are masters that do that, and you can admire the architecture of it. [...] I suppose what I look for as a reader is a writer who's risky, who's putting themselves in a position that's vulnerable, where the text knows a little bit more, is a bit ahead of them. And so I aspire to write those books, and that's why I suppose I put myself in that position. View quote
Hisham Matar
Writing is both the easiest thing and the most difficult thing. What makes it the one or the other for me remains uncertain... View quote
Hisham Matar