I am not sure why it is that certain dreams vanish from memory while others remain, and remain not only vividly but are then recalled by certain indefinable occurrences in the waking hours. Ten years ago I had one such dream. Edward Said is sitting on the floor, on the blue carpet that I remember so well, in our old dining room.

"The book that has affected me most is one I came across when I was ten or eleven years old and about which I know almost nothing. I haven’t read it. And, notwithstanding the many attempts I have made to find it, I have failed to learn so much as its title or the name of its author."

"In November, a few days after Donald Trump won the presidential election, I flew to Arkansas to give a reading at the Fayetteville Public Library. I landed just before sunset. The earth was the colour of rust, the trees fiery with the end of autumn and the cattle, which grazed with seemingly no movement at all, were black. I didn’t know anyone there."

"The most magical moments in reading occur not when I encounter something unknown but when I happen upon myself."

"Even the desert had flowers. No one remembered a spring like it. No one could have predicted then the darkness that was to come. And like everyone else, we felt bold."

"Salvatore Satta, a highly regarded jurist in Rome, kept his literary ambitions to himself. Before he died in 1975, he left a manuscript, which he had been writing in secret over a number of years, on his desk."

"Like all translation, language is compromised and propelled and made more wondrous by its unreliability, its shifting nuances, its shadows and half-suggestions, all the gaps where we might find ourselves."

"With each book [Woolf] became more obsessed with language and how when we speak we often fall short of or else exceed what we intended to express. Talking as a betrayal: saying too much, or not enough."

"Its sideways light holds everything in a soft orange glow: the color of reticence and doubt, the color of my generation of Libyans and the historical moment we inherited."