Proust Quotes

The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marcel Proust shut out visitors from his cork-lined room, where he wrote, but he probably expected to be immortalized in the literary canon. Even the most introverted drives and motives are set in a social context and amplified by the potential for achieving fame.

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

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

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

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

I'm sure Proust was a big bore.

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

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.

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

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

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

I once read somewhere that Sean Connery left school at the age of 13 and later went on to read Proust and Finnegans Wake and I keep expecting to meet an enthusiastic school leaver on the train, the type of person who only ever reads something because it is marvellous (and so hated school). Unfortunately the enthusiastic school leavers are all minding their own business.

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

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

In the spirit of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it . . . a wild book.

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.