Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Dreams have consequences.
My father believed in armed struggle.
Books have shown me horror and beauty.
Living in hope is a really terrible thing.
Nothing is more acceptable than what we are born into.
From my family alone, Qaddafi had imprisoned five men.
Making something of loss is, on some level, satisfying.
It is easy to underestimate the demands of an open heart.
When I'm writing, my mood is very good - and I love life.
The laws of the lowly gangster govern Qaddafi and his sons.
Grief loves the hollow; all it wants is to hear its own echo.
Great writing fills me with hopeful enthusiasm and never envy.
The cost of Colonel Gaddafi's rule on Libyan society is incalculable.
All great art allows us this: a glimpse across the limits of our self.
To be okay with not knowing is a sign of a mature person and a mature society.
Language is not just a code; you are writing into its history, into its tides.
It is sometimes hard to escape the belief that history exists against the artist.
In the end, madness is worse than injustice, and justice far sweeter than freedom.
Ivan Turgenev's novella 'First Love' is one of the most perfect things ever written.
We got rid of Muammar Gaddafi. I never thought I would be able to write these words.
My work is my shelter, particularly in these moments when things are happening fast.
Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.
The Qaddafis, father and sons, speak the grammar of dictatorship: threats and bribery.
I used to be a keen rider. Sometimes I could sense what a horse liked or preferred to do.
Political dictatorships take possession not just of money and belongings but of narrative.
The three things that help writing the most are living, writing, and reading. In that order.
There and then, sitting beside her and within the strength of my adoration, I felt invincible.
I am, by instinct, wary of revolutions. The gathering of the masses fills me with trepidation.
My parents left Libya in 1979, escaping political repression, and settled in Cairo. I was nine.
My father, the political dissident Jaballa Matar, disappeared from his home in Cairo in March 1990.
Civil war is a national crisis and also a private trauma: We suffer it collectively and in isolation.
I am longing to see Libya rejoin the world as the internationalist Mediterranean country that it was.
I wanted to wear her as you would a piece of clothing, to fold into her ribs, be a stone in her mouth.
Over the centuries, close-knit tribes have played an important part in the cohesion of Libyan society.
There's something very bizarre about having a father who has disappeared. It's very hard to articulate.
I am of the firm opinion that no one should tell writers what to do, or what to write, or how to write.
For an overwhelming majority of my life, my country has been a source of pain, fear, and embarrassment.
It is evident that Qaddafi is mentally unwell. Like Richard III, he has barricaded himself within lies.
Nothing we read can import new or foreign feelings that we don't, in one form or another, already possess.
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.
I admire Turgenev, Camus, Proust and Shakespeare, but I've also learnt a lot about writing from composers and artists.
Gaddafi tried to give a masterclass to men like the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, on how to crush a civilian uprising.
I've never been particularly interested in genre distinctions. They seem to me more useful to a librarian than to a writer.
When you've been living in hope for a long time as I have, suddenly you realize that certainty is far more desirable than hope.
Architecture remains a passion and a subject I'm very interested in. I learned a great deal from studying it and working in it.
As part of the ritual of becoming a man, my maternal uncle, a judge, and his four sons, each older than me, took me deer hunting.
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.
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.
I am terribly interested in the paragraph: the paragraph as an object, the construction, and the possibilities of what a paragraph can do.