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

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

…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 preoccupies me in my work is the art itself. It is a question of fidelity: I refuse for my work to serve anything or anyone but itself; more precisely, the work refuses, and I obey.