Andre Aciman Quotes
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.'
Quotes to Explore
-
I've never been able to understand what they mean by 'Pinteresque,'. I'm sure it's indefinable.
-
Fortunately, in the place where I went out, they had set up a little previously a fence which prevented me finally from smashing against trees. I went out with a broken leg only. A small price to be paid at the time for an accident of this kind.
-
A filmmaker can never be distant from his roots.
-
Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things.
-
People should know what they want, not just what they don't want.
-
I like to go to my simple cottage by the ocean or, really, any beach!
-
People constantly describe me as a formalist or even a minimalist, but I'm not really bothered with the rules of painting or the history of painting. My approach is that everything is mine. I take what I can use from wherever, and then I forget where I've taken it from. But there is no point me making anything that looks like anyone else's.
-
I loathe bad theater and most theatre is very bad because it's repetitious, unexciting and, dangerously, it is sometimes praised for those things.
-
It was a small provincial place with great people and I had a happy childhood growing up in Queens.
-
I don't normally take to Yorkshiremen.
-
My choosing Islam was not a political statement; it was a spiritual statement.
-
I want to be different and have a good story. If it's a good story, then everybody is trying to tell it, everybody is better for it, and it's just more fun.
-
Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.
-
God is love. I have loved. Therefore, I will go to heaven.
-
My family is heavily involved in the Marines and close-combat training, and I was raised doing Japanese sword training, so I've always been of the mentality that you have to be able to defend yourself.
-
Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis. The most exciting letters I received were from people in places like that.
-
Today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.
-
As long as I can contribute, I'll continue working.
-
The evil into which these philosophers have fallen is greater than that from which they sought to escape, because they refuse to say that God neglects or forgets a thing, and yet they maintain that His knowledge is imperfect, that He is ignorant of what is going on here on earth, that He does not perceive it.
-
Now that Mandela has been released from prison we can all admit what has been apparent, that he is not a Tembu tribesman, in fact he is not an African at all. He is quite obviously Chinese. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it makes those who persist in seeing him as a great African statesman look rather foolish.
-
There is no great achievement that is not the result of patient working and waiting.
-
Remember that as a teenager you are in the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear the phone is for you.
-
Everything I learned as an actor, I have basically applied to writing.
-
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.'
