Andre Aciman Quotes

Andre Aciman

Profession : Writer

Birth : January 2, 1951

Rituals are how we step into our private field of dreams, a small Elysium all our own. Rituals are made not just for us, but for those we want to pass them on to.

Andre Aciman

There was a time when Stefan Zweig was the most widely read author in the world. He was lionized everywhere, translated into every language. For the first four decades of the 20th century, his novellas and biographies were devoured by rich and poor, young and old, well read or less so.

Andre Aciman

Proust is interested in minutiae because life, as he sees it, is seldom ever about things but about our impression of things, not about facts but about the interpretation of facts, not about one particular feeling but about a confluence of conflicting feelings. Everything is elusive in Proust because nothing is ever certain.

Andre Aciman

I may write about place and displacement, but what I'm really writing about is dispersion, evasion, ambivalence: not so much a subject as a move in everything I write.

Andre Aciman

Rituals are magical.

Andre Aciman

An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss.

Andre Aciman

Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust - not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius, they are meant to be read out loud and loved.

Andre Aciman

Rituals are the building blocks of life, my way of cobbling an entire summer together from incidental wisps.

Andre Aciman

The last thing I want to do is to write about real things. I am not interested in reality and in real human beings and their real day-to-day problems - I just want to say to them, 'Hold still, and I'm just going to unpack, see what's inside.'

Andre Aciman

As irony would have it, the very person who inspired me to write a memoir... was the only person to be ejected from it. My brother didn't appear in 'Out of Egypt.'

Andre Aciman

You cannot understand what it means to be poor until you have suffered it.

Andre Aciman

For the religious, Passover is the grateful remembrance of a homeward journey after years of suffering.

Andre Aciman

What great writers have done to cities is not to tell us what happens in them, but to remember what they think happened or, indeed, might have happened. And so Dickens reinvented London, Joyce, Dublin, and so on.

Andre Aciman

I can't forget the scene in 'My Night at Maud's' when the very pious engineer in the business suit decides to sit on Maud's bed while she is lying under the covers with only a T-shirt on, determined to seduce him.

Andre Aciman

Chaste love happens all the time, far more frequently than adultery.

Andre Aciman

Writing the past is never a neutral act. Writing always asks the past to justify itself, to give its reasons... provided we can live with the reasons. What we want is a narrative, not a log; a tale, not a trial. This is why most people write memoirs using the conventions not of history, but of fiction.

Andre Aciman

Authors use 'almost' to avoid stating an outright fact, as though there were something inauthentic, dishonest, unfinished, undecided or even unwholesome - some might say repulsive, tacky, snub-nosed, too direct - in qualifying anything as definitely a this or a that.

Andre Aciman

Irene Nemirovsky was a prolific writer punctiliously devoted to her craft.

Andre Aciman

Am I the only person who wishes he could escape his own life for a few hours?

Andre Aciman

The problem with Egypt is that there is no public trust. There is no trust, period.

Andre Aciman