Hisham Matar Quotes

I love work where I can find out more about the world and its history.

One of the secrets of life is to keep our intellectual curiosity acute.

A personal library is a reflection of who you are and who you want to be, of what you value and what you desire, of how much you know and how much more you'd like to know.

Writing gives me the license to go, explore, and learn about the world.

I am like a sponge: I adore reading, watching films, and visiting museums and exhibitions. I am always in search of new things in many spheres.

Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.

We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.

It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one's environment.

Basically, I'm a perpetual student. I start by finding a subject I really don't know very much, but that I'm curious about. I learn about it through books in a library, by doing interviews with people who know a lot about the subject, and by going out on my own and seeing for myself what's happening.

Read. Read anything. Read the things they say are good for you, and the things they claim are junk. You'll find what you need to find. Just read.

The man who seeks to educate himself must first read and then travel in order to correct what he has learned.

The more you read, the more you realize there are fascinating books to be read and so little time to do so.

Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.

I do a lot of reading, a lot of studying. I ask questions, I'll go out, travel these countries, I'll watch how their people live, and I learn.

Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

I loved to learn everything, everything in sight, and I was never satisfied that I knew everything there was to know in each of my courses.

And, one thing I definitely enjoyed personally, from a selfish point of view, was exploration and going to places that I had never been to before and learning, you know, meeting the people and getting to know, new sights and sounds, etc.

I would be a poorer person if the only things I knew were what I had found out for myself.

What better way to expand your imagination than to read!

It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.

Everybody learns from traveling. I think we all do.

You don't read in your own field. You read in that field when you're young, so that you can learn.

Educate yourself as much as you can with life. Just go out there.