Hisham Matar Quotes

You can't be a writer and have nothing to write about. You have to have life experiences.

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they're just infested with lots of stuff.

I think writing and reading are completely synergistic; not necessarily in that one has to be a good reader to be a good writer or vice versa, but that they so inform each other.

Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.

In order to write about life first you must live it.

Read a lot. Write a lot. Have fun.

I'm a novelist who read a lot as a kid. When you grow up on books and then grow up to write books, famous authors are a lot more meaningful to you than TV and movie stars.

I love to read, and I love to write. I love to read. You have no idea how many books I have.

Sometimes I'm asked if I do research for my stories. The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that I seldom plow through books at the library to gather material. Yes, in the sense that the first fifteen years of my life turned out to be one big research project.

All experience helps when you write.

I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

You write about what you know.

Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.

I wrote 'Marvels,' which was about a guy who had two daughters, and I wrote 'Astro City Volume 2 #1,' which was about a guy who had two daughters. In both cases, about a year and a half or two years apart. And then after that, I had two daughters, about a year and a half or two years apart.

I was quite a reader before I became a writer.

I've been writing for as long as I can remember, and reading even before that. My mom still has stories that I wrote when I was in kindergarten. I was a reader and a re-reader. That's the main reason I became a writer.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

Most fiction comes from your experience.

I have lost stories and many starts of novels before. Not always as punishment for 'telling,' but more often as a result of something having gone cold and dead because of a hiatus. Telling, you see, is the same as a hiatus. It means you're not doing it.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

I love to read. But I loved to read a lot longer than I started to love writing.

I wrote my first story when I was six or seven.

You've got to live life to write a book about it.

Naturally, I mine my girlfriends' lives for good anecdotes and stories - so many of their experiences find their way into my books.

Most of my characters are an amalgamation of people that I've met, my family, or myself. Being a writer, you can draw only from what you know. I am lucky to have really rich and interesting people in my family for, you know, interesting family nights and great characters.