Hisham Matar

"I noticed that my problems occur when I try to dominate the text, when I try to ask it to be something, or to ask it to fit into some sort of structure, or when I ask it to compliment my ego, or all o…"

"…I enjoyed the fact that I had a destination, and so the picture I was looking at became like an encounter with someone who told you certain things on that day that they hadn’t on the day before. It i…"

"Premeditated details arrive, when you're writing, and my instinct is always to reach for the nearest weapon."

"…Justice is educative, justice is apolitical, justice resists nothing, for it is the normative state, may even go as far as saying that justice is, in the Aristotelian sense, aesthetic. Therefore what…"

"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 pul…"

"…Since I was a boy I attended English schools. For this reason my English tends to be better than my Arabic. This is the practical reason behind my writing in English. That is not to say that it is "n…"

"Writing is both the easiest thing and the most difficult thing. What makes it the one or the other for me remains uncertain…"