Quotes About Proust

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.

So even that marvelous, long remembrances of life all the time in the world to just sit there or lie there or walk about slowly remembering all the details of life which now because a million lightyears away have taken on the aspect (as they must've for Proust in his sealed room) of pleasant mental movies brought up at will and projected for further study—And pleasure—As I imagine God to be doing this very minute, watching his own movie, which is us.

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.

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

Proust is long-winded, precious, and a bit of an old woman

So the days pass and I ask myself sometimes whether one is not hypnotised, as a child by a silver globe, by life; and whether this is living. It's very quick, bright, exciting. But superficial perhaps. I should like to take the globe in my hands and feel it quietly, round, smooth, heavy, and so hold it, day after day. I will read Proust I think. I will go backwards and forwards.

A superficial reader of Proust's work- rather a contradiction in terms since a superficial reader will get so bored, so engulfed in his own yawns, that he will never finish the book- [the] inexperienced reader, let us say... will probably conclude that the main action of the book is a series of parties; for example, a dinner occupies a hundred and fifty pages, a soirée half a volume.

Peter Drucker and his book The Effective Executive, as well as Alain de Botton's (page 486) How Proust Can Change Your Life.

Los dos somos grandes seguidores de Peter Drucker y de su libro El ejecutivo eficaz (Círculo de lectores, 1997), así como de la obra de Alain de Botton (véase capítulo con el mismo título) titulada Cómo cambiar tu vida con Proust (RBA,

The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We're increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism.

Proust, my big inspiration for 'Goon Squad,' uses music a lot in his novel, both in terms of plot and structure. I liked the idea of doing the same thing, which is one reason I structured 'Goon Squad' as a record album, with an A side and a B side, that's built around the contrasting sounds of the individual numbers in it.

I would like to be able to convey to you the sound of dead voices, to break open this unbearable tomb of sound, to wrest something more than silhouettes from vanished years and by some unimaginable trick let you hear the ha-ha-ha with which Catulle Mendès accompanied the slightest sentence, the muffled voice of Edmond Rostand or the laughter which Proust smeared over his face with his white-gloved hand and his beard.

Riled by pedantic reviewers in search of a solecism, Proust said that there was no correctness this side of originality.

The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust

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

The wildwood brings on mild nostalgia, not for home or place, but for lost innocence—the paradise lost that, as Proust said, is the only paradise.

Some bookstores want you to believe they're a community center. Like they need to host a cookie making class class in order to sell you some Proust. But the Strand leaves you completely on your own. Caught between the warring forces of organization and idiosyncrasy, with idiosyncrasy winning every time.

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.

We shall see later on that the diversity of the forms of death that circulate invisibly is the cause of the peculiar unexpectedness of obituary notices in the newspapers.

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

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?

The only true paradise is paradise lost

Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect.

Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.