Top 97 Proust Quotes & Sayings

My mother was right: When you've got nothing left, all you can do is get into silk underwear and start reading Proust.

I haven't read a word of Proust. And I listen obsessively to sports radio.

Proust is a huge author for me.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

There's nothing like taking Proust to the beach and daydreaming along to it.

Both Proust and Joyce record the ways in which human perspectives can be transformed. In Portrait, Stephen Dedalus is constantly undergoing epiphanies, but their effects are transitory: the new synthetic complex quickly falls apart. Proust's characters, by contrast, often achieve lasting changes of perspective.

Proust had his madeleines; I am devastated by the scent of yeast bread rising.

I like the language in Proust but not the context.

I have depth. I've read Proust. No, wait, that was Pooh. Winnie the Pooh. My bad" Charley Davidson.

A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.

Ideally I'd like to spend two evenings a week talking to Proust and another conversing with the Holy Ghost.

I'd like to read all of Proust.

Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting.

Im 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.

You know, the more grown-up you are, the more you like Proust.

Proust's tea cake has nothing on one hour in a college dorm.

Nothing would have shocked Proust more than to hear that his work was perceived as difficult or inaccessibly rarefied.

Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.

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.

I find it's impossible for me to read Proust.

I identify myself as what I am. I'm half Jewish, like Proust. I have no other way to put it.

It is Proust's implacable honesty, his reluctance to cut corners or to articulate what might have been good enough or credible enough in any other writer that make him the introspective genius he is.

It is one of the many merits of this admirable biography of Proust's mother that it invites one to return to the novel with perhaps a fuller understanding of Proust's heredity, hinterland, and upbringing. . . . This fascinating book is full of interesting social and cultural observation, of information about French Jewish life, the position of Jews in society and, of course, the Dreyfus case. But it is essentially a study of one of the most remarkable and fruitful of mother-son relationships. As such it is a book that every Proustian will want to read.

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.

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.

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.

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?

Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust.

A ton of Proust isn’t worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury.

Sometimes I wish I could go back through time to meet Proust, just so I could give him my asthma inhaler. The poor guy.

If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust.

Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth.

I read "Remembrance of Things Past" in the original French. I never start the day without reading me some [Marcel] Proust.

The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.

I grew up reading Proust all my life, and he's very dear to me.

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.

Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned.

I admire Turgenev, Camus, Proust and Shakespeare, but I've also learnt a lot about writing from composers and artists.

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.

A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism.

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.

Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust - not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius, they are meant to be read out loud and loved.

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.

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.

One measures oncoming old age by its deepening of Proust, and its deepening by Proust. How to read a novel? Lovingly, if it shows itself capable of accomodating one's love; and jealously, because it can become the image of one's limitations in time and space, and yet can give the Proustian blessing of more life.

How about Proust's In Search of Lost Time?" Tamaru asked. "If you've never read it this would be a good opportunity to read the whole thing." "Have you read it?" "No, I haven't been in jail, or had to hide out for a long time. Someone once said unless you have those kinds of opportunities, you can't read the whole of Proust.

There was a moment when designers draped in ermine would be reading Proust, or pretending to.

Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.

When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.

I've read Proust and Stendhal. That keeps you in your place.

I know of no better definition of love than the one given by Proust - Love is space and time measured by the heart.

After Proust, there are certain things that simply cannot be done again. He marks off for you the boundaries of your talent.

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

Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else's dirty water.

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.

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.

I'm sure Proust was a big bore.

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?

My life reads more like Proust than a tabloid.

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.