ANDRE ACIMAN

A hidden nerve is what every writer is ultimately about. It's what all writers wish to uncover when writing about themselves in this age of the personal memoir. And yet it's also the first thing every writer learns to sidestep, to disguise, as though this nerve were a deep and shameful secret that needs to be swathed in many sheaths.

Some people have an identity. I have an alibi. I have a shadow self.

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

Older students know what they want, which is good.

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.

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

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.

Under Nasser, Egyptian nationalism was built on little more than pan-Arab irredentism and anti-Western and anti-Israeli sentiment. Mr. Mubarak retained these powerful brainwashers and allowed the rise of a religious component to further alienate Egyptians from liberal and democratic thinking.

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.

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

My family were finally kicked out of Egypt in 1965 for being Jewish. We managed to remain longer than most.

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.'

Rituals are magical.

You cannot understand what it means to be poor until you have suffered it.

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 comes the time at every Passover seder when someone will open a door to let in the prophet Elijah. At that moment, something like a spell invariably descends over the celebrants, and everyone stares into the doorway, trying to make out the quiet movements of the prophet as he glides his way in and takes the empty seat among us.

Take away our things, and something in us dies.

Writing plays fast and loose with the past.

Exiles see double, feel double, are double. When exiles see one place, they're also seeing - or looking for - another behind it.

The first thing a writer needs to know is what kind of writer he/she is.

For the religious, Passover is the grateful remembrance of a homeward journey after years of suffering.

'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.

What great writers have done to cities is not to tell us what happens in them, but to remember what they think happened or, indeed, might have happened. And so Dickens reinvented London, Joyce, Dublin, and so on.

'Almost' can be a polite way of saying something definitely. It withholds the obvious and dangles it just long enough.

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.