Hisham Matar Quotes

Not only is it harder to be a man, it is also harder to become one.

In traditional Hindu families like ours, men provided and women were provided for. My father was a patriarch and I a pliant daughter. The neighborhood I'd grown up in was homogeneously Hindu, Bengali-speaking, and middle-class. I didn't expect myself to ever disobey or disappoint my father by setting my own goals and taking charge of my future.

I think that there's so many levels of what is appropriate for an Indian woman to do.

My work generally tends to be an all-out, 360-degree subversive take on everything, most of all my own notion of myself as a son, father, husband, human being and male in this culture.

I spent my whole life trying to play the games males play.

There's a certain kind of behavior in the Arab world that, to me, resembles the way young men behave when there is no significant influence from women in their lives.

An African man should not do anything called housework or cooking.

I just think that culturally, women - we're all human beings - but at least we don't have our masculinity to prove.

Family life in Western society since the time of the Old Testament has been a struggle to maintain patriarchy, male domination, and double standards in the face of a natural drift towards monogamous bonding. Young men have been called upon to prove their masculinity by their willingness to die in warfare, and young women have been called upon to prove their femininity by their willingness to die for their man. Women have been asked to appear small, dumb, and helpless so men would feel big and strong, brave, and clever. It's been a trick.

I think a man is a man, and a man has a hairy chest, so let that be!

French women will always look up at a man, even if he is four inches shorter than she is.

I was a girl in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children.

To me all men are boy-men. I don't know any man that's actually mature.

What works for a man, still does not work for a woman - both in terms of how they see themselves and how we see them.

We take men's obligation to earn money, and when they do it well, we blame them for having power and being oppressors. And when they don't do it all, women just don't marry men who are reading 'I'm Okay, You're Okay' in the unemployment line.

I was never in an awkward position where I had to curb my manhood.

The only men who aren't in fear of women's reactions are usually men who aren't born or who are dead.

Housework is the only activity at which men are allowed to be consistently inept because they are thought to be so competent at everything else.

I have brothers, and that so-called boyish quality was something that I was deathly self-conscious about when I was younger.

The real victims of men are other men.

Black men don't like to be called 'boys,' but women accept being called 'girls.'

What does it mean to a successful woman today? Does it mean you have to be a mother? If you are a mother, does it mean you have to be a mother with a husband? If you don't have a husband, what is the role that the man plays? I think there are a lot of confusing things that we're all really still sorting out.

When I was about 12 and first started wearing lipstick, my dad would ask, 'Are you wearing makeup?' I would say back, 'You're wearing more makeup there than I am!'

'I'll be back' always sounded a little girly to me.

There are alternate definitions of manhood in the West.