Andre Aciman

“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.”

“With Eric Rohmer - as with Mozart, Austen, James, and Proust - we need to remember that art is seldom about life, or not quite about life. Art is about discovery and design and reasoning with chaos.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Older students know what they want, which is good.”

“In Alexandria, my birthplace and my home, all streets bearing Jewish names have been renamed.”

“Marseilles, Barcelona, Trieste, Istanbul - each romances the Mediterranean in its own fashion, mostly by embracing the sea in sweeping C-shaped bays that date back to antiquity.”

“There are many things about my life that I wish had been different and that I still find difficult to live down.”

“I tolerate lots of people I have no patience or respect for. Then, as soon as I can, I rat on them.”

“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.'”

“With ritual, I punctuate my days till they no longer belong to who I am today but to who I'll be when I look back in days and years to come.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“I cannot write if there is a sense of plenitude. I have to hypothesize that there is a loss.”

“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.”

“Rituals are magical.”

“Egypt wants to be young again. Israel must show it never grew old. Egypt wants to wake up and dream again. Israel must learn to dream though it cannot sleep.”