…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 w… - Hisham Matar

…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 is a habit that remains with me. Sometimes I spend a couple of months looking at one picture in a gallery, sometimes a year.

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

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 of these things. That's really where all my problems start from. Where it's going very well, is where I have sort of surrendered to it, you know, where I am behind the text, and I am watching, like a dancer who's following another dancer, and just watching where it might go next. All I want to be is, I want to be as ready and as available as possible for it. That seems to me all I really need to do.