Andre Aciman Quotes

James Salter has talents on the page we novelists would sell souls to the devil for.

I read 'The First Bad Man' by Miranda July, and I just thought, 'Oh my God, I'll never be this good. That book is so incredible.'

Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir!

There are some incredibly gifted writers in the world. You can count them on a hand. They're blessed, and they've worked at their craft, but there's very few.

I am a writer... I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name.

David Simon is a brilliant writer, brilliant at being able to take what is ordinary and make it extraordinary.

Good writers are of necessity rare.

Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.

I always wanted to write as much as perform.

Nor ought a genius less than his that writ attempt translation.

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

Men there have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to have earned an immortality in the doing; but we have had not many of them, and they make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity that things should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companion imaginable.

Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

Since the moment I could hold a pencil, I have spent nearly all day every day writing. And there is not an age group that I have not written for. You can read me from birth 'til death.

I'm probably better known for boxing with Hemingway than for anything I've written.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.

Writing can't be taught.

You don't have to be dead to write a classic, and you don't have to be literary to be smart.

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

My name became a brand, and I'd love to say that was the plan from the start. But the only plan was to keep writing books. And I've stuck to that ever since.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

I've always been a very prolific writer.

I am happy because I am no longer an author.

Writers don't retire. I will always be a writer.

Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.