QUOTES by Garth Stein
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I hope and pray that I'll be one of those fortunate people who have many, many books to write. I don't begrudge writing. I love the whole thing!
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The Qaddafis, father and sons, speak the grammar of dictatorship: threats and bribery.
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The romantic idea of the penniless writer is false. It's terrible. I hated being in debt. I hated the anxiety of not knowing whether we could pay our rent that month. Thankfully, I had a wife who was very supportive and had faith and shared my madness.
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There's always a problem when you write, something you're trying to resolve, and sometimes a view can be inspiring.
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There is a tendency to over-exaggerate and over-romanticise the place of a writer in a revolution. That bothers me. I think it's inappropriate.
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To me, writing is like singing in the most inappropriate place, singing as beautifully as you can on a bus or in a bank, where people least expect it, and trying to get them to want to listen.
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One of the reasons why Gadafy's dictatorship has managed to remain in power for so long is not just because it has shown itself to be able to exact a great deal of violence, both psychological and physical, on its people, but because it has been very successful at imposing a narrative, a story.
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My work is my shelter, particularly in these moments when things are happening fast.
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To be okay with not knowing is a sign of a mature person and a mature society.
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I am longing to see Libya rejoin the world as the internationalist Mediterranean country that it was.
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Throughout my entire life, I have lived in the shadow of the dictatorship. It denied me safety and security.
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For an overwhelming majority of my life, my country has been a source of pain, fear, and embarrassment.
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Political dictatorships take possession not just of money and belongings but of narrative.
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Audacity, hope, courage - the Libyans have these in abundance. But all those boring little things - like organization, building a committee - is hard; making decisions and moving ahead is hard.
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There are two voices: the first says write; the second hardly speaks, but I know what he wants. And if I let him, nothing would get done. He hovers at the edges.
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I sometimes wonder if I would have become a writer if what happened to my father hadn't happened.
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There's something very bizarre about having a father who has disappeared. It's very hard to articulate.
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Some of the most powerful memories are those when you are very, very young. Adult life is seen through the reflection of complex, rational thought.
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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.
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I think my generation's inability to speak in absolute terms when it comes to politics is a very positive thing; it's made us more nuanced, made us more complex.
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My parents were fairly laid-back, but there were certain things about which they were very strict. My brother and I were told never to turn away a person in need. And it didn't matter what we thought of their motives, whether they were truly in need or not.
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My father, the political dissident Jaballa Matar, disappeared from his home in Cairo in March 1990.
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I've always said - I've always said I'm not, by temperament, a romantic about revolutions or given to revolutions. I've always thought that they are not the ideal way to change.
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I used to be a keen rider. Sometimes I could sense what a horse liked or preferred to do.
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I've never been particularly interested in genre distinctions. They seem to me more useful to a librarian than to a writer.
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I used to believe that it was not possible to lose someone I loved without sensing it somehow, without feeling something shift. But it's not true. People can die, sometimes the closest people to us, without us noticing a thing.
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I lost my father when I was 19, so the majority of my life has been under this cloud, and I have been full of the intention to find out what happened.
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When a dictatorship imprisons someone or makes them disappear, it's actually a very strategic move. We forget that. It's not as senseless as it seems. It's a way to silence someone, but also it's a way to silence their family as well, out of fear, and society by extension.
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One of the dark truths about dictators - and it applies to Gaddafi - is that on some level, they love their people. But it is a strange love. It says, 'I love you for me; I don't love you for you.' That rhymes with a certain kind of Libyan father who was always certain about what was good for those around him. Those fathers lose in the end.
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I've never thought of myself in terms of an identity. I'm always baffled when I encounter someone who gives the impression about being confident about a particular defined identity.
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I am terribly interested in the paragraph: the paragraph as an object, the construction, and the possibilities of what a paragraph can do.
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Nothing we read can import new or foreign feelings that we don't, in one form or another, already possess.
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Whenever I was encouraged by my elders to pick up a book, I was often told, 'Read so as to know the world.' And it is true; books have invited me into different countries, states of mind, social conditions and historical epochs; they have offered me a place at the most unusual gatherings.
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Switching languages is a form of conversion. And like all conversions, whether it's judged a failure or a success, it excites the desire to leave, go elsewhere, adopt a new language and start all over again. It also means that a conscious effort is demanded to remain still.
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In Libya, I did well at school because I was clever. In Egyptian public school, I got the highest marks for the basest of reasons. And in the American school, I struggled. Everything - mathematics, the sciences, pottery, swimming - had to be conducted in a language I hardly knew and that was neither spoken in the streets nor at home.
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