A Quote by Theodor Adorno

It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author.

Theodor Adorno

Quote Topics

Author Believing Believing Him Courtesy Embarrassment Himself Proust Reader Spare Than

Quote Author

Theodor Adorno
German - Sociologist
September 11, 1903 - August 6, 1969

When an acquaintance goes by I often step back from my window, not so much to spare him the effort of acknowledging me as to spare myself the embarrassment of seeing that he has not done so.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.

Marcel Proust

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

The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The author always knows more than the reader does at the start of a novel, and gradually, they share that knowledge with the reader - that's storytelling.

Simon Toyne

I encourage courtesy. To accept nothing less than courtesy, and to give nothing less than courtesy. If we accept being talked to any kind of a way, then we are telling ourselves we are not quite worth the best. And if we have the effrontery to talk to anybody with less than courtesy, we tell ourselves and the world we are not very intelligent.

Maya Angelou

In the worst memoirs, you can feel the author justifying himself - forgiving himself - in every paragraph. In the best memoirs, the author is tougher on him- or herself than his or her readers will ever be.

Darin Strauss

Spero Speroni explains admirably how an author who writes very clearly for himself is often obscure to his readers. "It is," he says, "because the author proceeds from the thought to the expression, and the reader from the expression to the thought.

Nicolas Chamfort

There is no embarrassment quite like the embarrassment of listening to a person for whom one has a regard making a fool of himself.

Margaret Deland

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

It has been remarked (by a lady infinitely cleverer than the present author) how kindly disposed the world in general feels to young people who either die or marry.

Susanna Clarke

It is a greater joy to see the author's author, than himself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The more imagination the reader has ... the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys.