A few days before the [Mr. America] contest we heard rumors about a man who had throngs of people following him along the Lake Michigan Beach front, and we couldn't imagine who could draw crowds by merely walking along the beach!
It seems that half the point of being in Miami Beach - particularly the northern end of South Beach - is to be observed by people-watchers like me, and the display along Ocean Drive during my visit was, as always, sublime.
You deserve to die," I whisper, suddenly realizing Iv'e said the words aloud. "Excuse me?" "Nothing." "Not nothing. You just told me that I deserve to be maggot feed." "Not maggot feed, just-" "Dead!" "Forget it" "I don't know why I said that. Just daydreaming, I guess." "Daydreaming about my death?" "Forget it", I repeat. "Are you sure you aren't still mad that I wouldn't let you borrow my vintage fishnet leggings?" "More like I didn't want to borrow them.
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.
Nothing keeps a company honest and efficient like the threat of other companies coming along and taking its business away.
I love Marcel Proust, but I leave him to his nostalgia. I don't approach art the way most people do. I don't get into Proust by imagining that I am Charlus or whoever. It's the same thing in painting - I try to look at it objectively. There's no pathos in that. It's like Bach's "Goldberg Variations." They have to be approached with a scalpel.
That daydreaming mode turns out to be restorative. It's like hitting the reset button in your brain. And you don't get in that daydreaming mode typically by texting and Facebooking. You get in it by disengaging.
I find I'm not one of these composers that are, you know, walking along a beach or walking on the mountainside in County Donegal that's, you know, 'Oh, a melody.' It's more a matter of eventually taking that moment with me to the studio, and it begins to evolve.
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.
When a war is over I think it's a cowardly thing to leave the war behind you in minefields that hit women and children and the most vulnerable. Imagine the war is finished and you go to work and there are snipers shooting at you. Imagine taking your kids to the beach and you find that the beach is blowing up beneath you. Like there's nowhere safe.
Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.
I was looking at pictures of cats laying out on the beach and I thought, "Cats hate water, so why would they like the beach?" But then I realized that cats like to just lay around and lounge and be lazy, and what better place to do that than on the beach?
For me there was-is-nothing better than walking on the beach late at night. It feels like you could walk forever, like the whole night is yours and so is the ocean. When you walk on the beach at night, you can say things you can't say in real life. In the dark you can feel really close to a person. You can say whatever you want.
Proust's tea cake has nothing on one hour in a college dorm.
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.
The dominant question for us with regard to literature has become, 'What does this have to do with me, with life as I know it?' That's the question answered by all these books about how Proust was actually a neuroscientist or how Proust can teach you emotional intelligence.