Best 13 quotes of Hisham Matar on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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

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

Nothing is more acceptable than what we are born into.

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.

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

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.

Can you become a man without becoming your father?

There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy

Those who would later lament Seif and his father's (Qaddafi) regime are like a man who looks at the ashes and says, "I much prefer the fire

What do you do when you cannot leave and cannot return?