Proust Quotes - Page 2

• 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

  Guessing, Fantasy, Wonder

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• James Cain - faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naix, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way.

  Raymond Chandler

  Dirty, Writing, Boys

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

  Samuel Beckett

  Solitude, Negation, Humans

  Samuel Beckett (1931). “Proust”

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• 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.

  Haruki Murakami

  Opportunity, Jail, Long

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

  Alison Bechdel

  Father, Bigger, Pansies

  Alison Bechdel (2007). “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic”, p.92, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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

  Walker Percy

  Cake, Alcohol, Pieces

  Walker Percy (2011). “Signposts in a Strange Land”, p.59, Open Road Media

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

  Alberto Moravia

  Century, Novel, Joyce

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• 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

  Reason Why, Impossible, Remember

  William Empson (1966). “Seven Types of Ambiguity”, p.249, New Directions Publishing

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

  Eugenio Montale

  Art, Narrative, Great Work

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• The same tantalizing guile and sublime skill....[The series is] reinforced in its claim to be one of the major literary works of this century....Only two other writers that this reviewer can think of have each created an entire, discrete and compelling world, a totally believable entity which one might wish to inhabit, and they are Joyce and Proust. It is not pretentious to place Patrick O'Brian in the first canon of literature.

  Kevin Myers

  Thinking, Skills, Two

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

  Bruce Chatwin

  Childhood, Raw Materials, Form

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

  Francoise Sagan

  Done, Talent, Boundaries

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• While reading writers of great formulatory power — Henry James, Santayana, Proust — I find I can scarcely get through a page without having to stop to record some lapidary sentence. Reading Henry James, for example, I have muttered to myself, "C’mon, Henry, turn down the brilliance a notch, so I can get some reading done." I may be one of a very small number of people who have developed writer’s cramp while reading.

  Joseph Epstein

  Reading, Numbers, People

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• 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.

  Allan Massie

  Mother, Book, Son

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• 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

  War, Book, Islands

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• 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

  Men, Literature, Today

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.65, Simon and Schuster

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

  Francoise Sagan

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• 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.

  Harold Bloom

  Love, Blessing, Space

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• 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

  Butterfly, Shade, Lasts

  Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.83, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Two, Rooms, Type

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• As for the multiple editions, in the case of a truly great writer - Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Proust, someone with a canon - there is often a "variorum" edition of the work that presents its variants. I think publishing most other writing that way would be impossible, economically, for publishers, and very ill-advised for authors.

  Judith Thurman

  Writing, Thinking, Way

  "Ask the Author Live: Judith Thurman on Laura Ingalls Wilder". Live chat, www.newyorker.com. July 31, 2009.

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• Mann and Joyce are very different, and yet their fiction often appeals to the same people: Harry Levin taught a famous course on Joyce, Proust, and Mann, and Joseph Campbell singled out Joyce and Mann as special favorites. To see them as offering "possibilities for living", as I do, isn't to identify any distinctive commonality. After all, many great authors would fall under that rubric.

  Philip Kitcher

  Fall, Offering, People

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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

  Sonia Rykiel

  Knows

  Source: fashioninterviews.blogspot.com

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

  Dave Barry

  Reading, Past, Remembrance

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• In the last volume of In Search of Lost Time, Proust compares himself to Scheherazade: he says he has finally understood the nature of the book he has to write, just at the moment when his advancing years and declining health have made him doubt that he's going to live long enough to write it. So he has to write against death like Scheherazade.

  Elif Batuman

  Book, Writing, Years

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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