Andre Aciman

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

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

I like to read the paper online. And I love email. And I love nothing better than to be interrupted.

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

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

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.

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

For every life we live, there are at least eight others we've gotten close to but may never know.

My Night at Maud's,' 'Claire's Knee,' 'Chloe in the Afternoon' are grafted onto my life.

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.

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

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.