Top 100 Quotes About Proust
#1. Some bookstores want you to believe they're a community center, like they need to host a cookie-making class in order to sell you some Proust.
David Levithan
#2. Reading Proust isn't just reading a book, it's an experience and you can't reject an experience.
William Gaddis
#3. In the spirit of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it ... a wild book.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
#4. She couldn't demand that Mrs. Proust get off the bed; it wasn't her bed. It wasn't her castle. She smiled. In fact it really wasn't her problem. How nice to find a problem that wasn't yours.
Terry Pratchett
#5. Hence Proust's assertion that the greatness of works of art has nothing to do with the apparent quality of their subject matter, and everything to do with the subsequent treatment of that matter.
Alain De Botton
#6. Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.
Albert Camus
#8. To me, the idea of living this lifestyle is so boring that I would prefer to read Marcel Proust the whole time during a tour.
Laurent Brancowitz
#10. I spent most of this weekend sitting on the sofa reading Proust. The only time my mother left her studio, which she locked behind her, was to go to Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt's house.
Rachel Klein
#11. It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.
Theodor Adorno
#12. my most desperate moments, I have never conceived of anything more horrible than a law office." -Marcel Proust
Petula Parker
#13. Donald Westlake's Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you've been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you'll want on that desert island.
Lawrence Block
#14. Achille Adrien Proust, was a famous doctor and epidemiologist, responsible for studying and attempting to remedy the causes and movements of cholera through Europe and Asia
Marcel Proust
#16. Don't be snowed by a handsome guy at a bookstore who quotes Cicero and Proust. They are often not the real thing. As with many fleeting pleasures
travel in their company, enjoy them every so often, and then get on with your life.
Jennifer Kaufman
#17. Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
Eugenio Montale
#18. The only way to defend language is to attack it ... ' - Proust. Every good writer in history had, in order to ensure adequate expression, broken a range of rules laid down by previous writers.
Alain De Botton
#19. Proust is famous for his rhapsodies on hawthorns but his book has only three of these, whereas there are thirteen scenes in brothels, one especially detailed episode running to more than forty pages. Few critics mention the brothels but they are more fun than the hawthorns.
Michael Foley
#20. The true voyage of self-discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. - MARCEL PROUST
Kristin Hannah
#21. Wall of lies?' Proust muttered. 'Is that the one that borders the orchard of obsession that contains the tree of lunacy?
Sophie Hannah
#22. Like Jean Genet, Robert was a terrible thief. Genet was caught and imprisoned for stealing rare volumes of Proust and rolls of silk from a shirt maker. Aesthetic thieves. I imagined his sense of horror and triumph as bits of Blake swirled into the sewers of New York City.
Patti Smith
#23. After Proust, there are certain things that simply cannot be done again. He marks off for you the boundaries of your talent.
Francoise Sagan
#24. That's it then. This is how it ends. I haven't even read Proust.
James Turner
#25. All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust.
Allan Bloom
#26. If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.
Alison Bechdel
#27. He [James Cain] is every kind of writer I detest ... a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking.
Raymond Chandler
#28. There's nothing like taking Proust to the beach and daydreaming along to it.
Jerry Hall
#29. I've got a man might do. No good for me, doesn't care for a flutter, and doesn't like Art either. But he has Proust in his overcoat pocket. Come to think of it, I suppose he reads it for the dirt, so no good for you, cancel what I said.
Doris Lessing
#30. Proust has listed a great many reasons why it is impossible to be happy, but, in the course of being happy, one finds it difficult to remember them.
William Empson
#31. Thackeray's a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.
Truman Capote
#32. As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.
Alain De Botton
#34. His work kept on living, like the watches on the wrists of dead soldiers. [Said of Marcel Proust]
Jean Cocteau
#35. I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating 'Swann's Way.' There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn't want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust's very long sentences.
Lydia Davis
#36. Only a determined and resourceful scholar could establish manuscript precedence - but in the race to masturbate on a printed page Proust definitely came first.
Michael Foley
#37. The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom.
Virginia Woolf
#38. My mother was right: When you've got nothing left, all you can do is get into silk underwear and start reading Proust.
Jane Birkin
#39. Marcel Proust shut out visitors from his cork-lined room, where he wrote, but he probably expected to be immortalized in the literary canon. Even the most introverted drives and motives are set in a social context and amplified by the potential for achieving fame.
Tyler Cowen
#40. A ton of Proust isn't worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury.
J.G. Ballard
#41. And yet, she suddenly wondered, should you actually lie about how much Proust you've read?
Alexander McCall Smith
#42. Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?
Saul Bellow
#43. My work comprises one vast book like Proust's except that my remembrances are written on the run instead of afterwards in a sick bed.
Jack Kerouac
#44. The only real voyage consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes; in seeing the universe through the eyes of another, one hundred others-in seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees.
Marcel Proust, translated by Kiyotesong
Rob Brezsny
#45. Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.
Marcel Proust
#46. The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.
Alberto Moravia
#47. It was a symbol of what Ruskin had done for Proust, and what all books might do for their readers, namely bring back to life, from the deadness caused by habit and inattention, valuable yet neglected aspects of experience.
Alain De Botton
#48. A light shines in the darkness but the darkness does not understand it." - John 1:5 "No man is a complete mystery but to himself" - Proust
Mark Edward Hall
#49. 10The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust
Jean-Paul Sartre
#50. We weren't idealistic about much, we children of the 1950s, but we were certainly idealistic about art. We went into it with the highest kind of ambition - not to get rich or to impress women, but to make our mark as Proust and Joyce had made their mark.
John Updike
#51. In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?
Manuel Puig
#52. Proust is a hero of mine. I read 'A la recherche' in one go, and I'm a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact, reading it on my own and being my main company. I think Proust is the most intelligent person to ever have written a novel.
Edward St. Aubyn
#53. Proust's is a long book, though, water- skiing permitting, you could get through it in the summer recess
Alan Bennett
#54. A large, still book is a piece of quietness, succulent and nourishing in a noisy world, which I approach and imbibe with "a sort of greedy enjoyment," as Marcel Proust said of those rooms of his old home whose air was "saturated with the bouquet of silence."
Holbrook Jackson
#55. If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation.
Anais Nin
#56. When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
Alain De Botton
#57. Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?
Elizabeth Bowen
#58. Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.
Samuel Beckett
#59. Tiffany had wondered how Granny and Mrs. Proust would get on, given that both of them were as proud as a cat full of sixpences.
Terry Pratchett
#60. Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting.
Jean Cocteau
#61. Ideally I'd like to spend two evenings a week talking to Proust and another conversing with the Holy Ghost.
Edna O'Brien
#62. Proust has been dead since 1922, yet the annual appearance of his posthumous works has left him, to the reader, alive. Now there is nothing left to publish. Five years after his interment, Proust seems dead for the first time.
Janet Flanner
#63. We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.
Oliver Sacks
#64. If I hadn't read all of Jane Austen and DH Lawrence, Tolstoy and Proust, as well as the more fun stuff, I wouldn't know how to break bad news, how to sympathise, how to be a friend or a lover, because I wouldn't have any idea what was going on in anybody else's mind.
Sebastian Faulks
#65. I have depth. I've read Proust. No, wait, that was Pooh. Winnie the Pooh. My bad
Charley Davidson.
Darynda Jones
#66. I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.
Evelyn Waugh
#67. That's what Proust calls it. On those rare occasions when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. That's the only real life, the only thing that makes you know you're alive - the backward ache. That's what music is.
Adam Haslett
#68. Beckett . . . Joyce . . . Proust . . . Shakespeare
Harold Bloom
#69. A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism.
Italo Svevo
#70. Proust's tea cake has nothing on one hour in a college dorm.
Gloria Steinem
#71. It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.
Alain De Botton
#72. It is seldom indeed that one parts on good terms, because if one were on good terms one would not part. - MARCEL PROUST
Jon Acuff
#73. You're our Marcel Proust, Mr. Zuckerman.
Zuckerman laughed. It wasn't exactly how he saw it.
Philip Roth
#75. I love long sentences. My big heroes of fiction writing are Henry James and Proust - people who recognise that life doesn't consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications, qualifications and feelings.
John Burnside
#76. I wonder what Proust would have made of our present-day locus of collective fantasy, the Internet. I'm guessing he would have seized on its wistful aspect, pointing out gently and with wry humor that much of what beguiles us is the act of reaching for what isn't there.
Jennifer Egan
#77. A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#78. Because the erotic frisson is such that the kiss that you only imagine giving,can be as powerful and as enchanting as hours of actual lovemaking. As Marcel Proust said, it's our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.
Esther Perel
#79. Many of the most accomplished people of our era were considered by experts to have no future. Jackson Pollock, Marcel Proust, Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Lucille Ball, and Charles Darwin were all thought to have little potential for their chosen fields.
Carol S. Dweck
#80. Proust said that you could seduce any woman if you were willing to sit and listen to her complain until four in the morning.
Martin Cruz Smith
#81. By itself, an ordinary snapshot is no less banal than the petite madeleine in Proust's In Search of Lost Time ... but as goad to memory, it is often the first integer in a sequence of recollections that has the power to deny time for the sake of love.
Michael Lesy
#82. Proust again: One can only wish that a man with such powers of total recall had led a less tedious life, moved among somewhat livelier circles ...
Edward Abbey
#83. I'm sick of the foodies who need every morsel that goes into their mouth to be a Picasso painting, a Giacometti sculpture, a Proust novel, evoking the world with each crumb.
Jessi Klein
#84. I've read Proust and Stendhal. That keeps you in your place.
Francoise Sagan
#85. His life and family circle changed considerably between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Proust's brother Robert married and left the family apartment. His father died in September of the same year. Finally, and most crushingly, Proust's beloved mother died in September 1905.
Marcel Proust
#86. Anyone who's read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles.
Lorrie Moore
#87. Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.
Bruce Chatwin
#88. Proust had his madeleines; I am devastated by the scent of yeast bread rising.
Bert Greene
#89. You have two types of writers: one like Proust who was locked in his room and wrote the masterpiece. And the other type was Hemingway who celebrated life and also wrote a masterpiece.
Paulo Coelho
#90. Einstein Freud Marx Proust Mahler Mendelssohn Chagall & don't forget Dr. Jonas Salk ... & still they hate us!
Sonia Taitz
#91. SAYING AND CONCEALING For I would prefer to have these attacks and please you, rather than displease you and not have them. - Marcel Proust in a letter to his mother
Alice Miller
#92. Proust's life changed due to a very large inheritance he received (in today's terms, a principal of about $6 million, with a monthly income of about $15,000).
Marcel Proust
#93. I know the secrets; I dig Joyce and Proust above Melville and Celine.
Jack Kerouac
#94. I didn't go to university; I hardly went to school, but I grew up among people well versed in Henry James and Proust, and just felt this endless, total inadequacy.
Emma Tennant
#95. Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.
Walker Percy
#96. Although Guy was thirty-five he was still working as a model, and certain of his more ironic and cultured friends called him, as the dying Proust had been called by Colette, 'our young man.
Edmund White
#97. Sometimes I wish I could go back through time to meet Proust, just so I could give him my asthma inhaler. The poor guy.
Rebecca Makkai
#98. Truth and life are very difficult to fathom, and I retained of them, without really having got to know them, an impression in which sadness was perhaps actually eclipsed by exhaustion.
Marcel Proust
#99. Like a blood-red sky that warns the passerby, "There is a fire over there," certain blazing looks often reveal passions that they serve merely to reflect. They are flames in the mirror.
Marcel Proust
#100. In most women's lives, everything, even the greatest sorrow, comes down to a question of 'I haven't got a thing to wear'.
Marcel Proust
