376 Quotes by André 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.

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

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.'

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

My vacations last one hour. Then I get bored, impatient.

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.

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

Whenever we're having a great time, we're already anticipating the day when we will remember this great time. Many of us live in that unreal area between the past, the present, and the future.

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.