Andre Aciman Quotes

Everything in life is gray, you know.

It's rare that movies can sort of capture the tone of life; movies always feel like they have to be one thing or another.

Ambiguity is something that I really respond to. I like the complexity of it.

There are infinite shades of grey. Writing often appears so black and white.

When we don't have information, we go to the simplest outlook, to black and white. But then we have to lie to ourselves. Black is never as black as you're painting it and white is never as white.

If I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.

The color of truth is gray.

There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about.

My books tend to have a lot of questions in them, and they tend to avoid black and white, for lack of a better metaphor.

Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth.

I don't look at things in black and white. There are big gray areas. There's a lot of slippage.

There's so much grey to every story - nothing is so black and white.

I like things that aren't superficially one thing or another.

Be obscure clearly.

In the intelligence business you are almost never completely wrong or completely right.

People who want to see things in stark dualities are not going to get much out of my music.

There are gray areas in everything.

I love telling stories, but I also am more aware now of how complex reality is and how difficult it is to really explain what happened or how I felt. Maybe that sometimes makes me a little bit vague, because I don't want to really put my finger on anything or set it in stone.

I realized all the writing I love lives in the gray area.

We paint a slow picture. You can see the brushstrokes. We don't get to the point, and sometimes when we do, our readers don't notice, in fact. It's so couched in nuance, it can fly right over a person's head. 'What was that you said? I couldn't quite make it out.'

...I am much better now at ambiguities.

I don't want to lose too much of the mystery by hammering every detail to death.

And isn't it better really to leave things only hinted at?

The gray area, the place between black and white - that's the place where life happens.

I am very Aristotelian in approach - not in detail - so I always find I'm saying things that get people frustrated like 'It's a matter of balance and judgement'. To a lot of philosophers these are terrible words because they're admitting of vagueness and uncertainty. The more I've done philosophy, the more I've become convinced that that is the way it is.