Words matter. These are the best Andre Aciman Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The problem with Egypt is that there is no public trust. There is no trust, period.
Nothing would have shocked Proust more than to hear that his work was perceived as difficult or inaccessibly rarefied.
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.’
For the religious, Passover is the grateful remembrance of a homeward journey after years of suffering.
The first thing a writer needs to know is what kind of writer he/she is.
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.
As a memoirist, I may claim to write the easier-to-remember things, but I could also just be writing to sweep them away. ‘Don’t bother me about my past,’ I’ll say, ‘It’s out in paperback now.’
I cannot write if there is a sense of plenitude. I have to hypothesize that there is a loss.
To those of us who have seen all of Eric Rohmer’s films, it is impossible not to remember when, where, with whom we saw each one. I even remember the second and third time I saw his films.
Losing his wealth, his home, the life he had built, killed my father. He didn’t die right away; it took four decades of exile to finish him off.
For every life we live, there are at least eight others we’ve gotten close to but may never know.
My family were finally kicked out of Egypt in 1965 for being Jewish. We managed to remain longer than most.
An exile reads change the way he reads time, memory, self, love, fear, beauty: in the key of loss.
‘Almost’ is all about gradations and nuance and about suggestion and shades. Not quite a red wine, but not crimson, not purple either, or maroon; come to think of it, ‘almost’ Bordeaux.
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.
Exiles see double, feel double, are double. When exiles see one place, they’re also seeing – or looking for – another behind it.
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.
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.
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.
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.’
We are, each one of us, not just defined by the arrangement of protein molecules in our cells, but also by the things we call our own.
Don’t all writers have a hidden nerve, call it a secret chamber, something irreducibly theirs, which stirs their prose and makes it tick and turn this way or that, and identifies them, like a signature, though it lurks far deeper than their style, or their voice or other telltale antics?
Irene Nemirovsky was a prolific writer punctiliously devoted to her craft.
Am I the only person who wishes he could escape his own life for a few hours?
Some people have an identity. I have an alibi. I have a shadow self.
