Quotes about Marcel Proust

38 Sourced Quotes

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

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

The Papuans have had no Proust and the Zulus have not yet produced a Tolstoy.

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....

Reading, like all work, has its rules. A perfect knowledge of a few writers and a few subjects is more valuable than a superficial one of a great many. The fine points of a piece of writing are seldom apparent at first reading. In youth, one should search among books as one searches the world for friends, and once these friends are found, chosen, and adopted, one must go into retirement with them. Intimacy with Montaigne, Saint Simon, Retz, Balzac, or Proust would be enough to enrich one's whole life.

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.

Proust's Law (are you listening?) is twofold: (a) What least thing our self-love longs for most Others instinctively withhold; (b) Only when time has slain desire Is his wish granted to a smiling ghost Neither harmed nor warmed, now, by the fire.

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

He had never read Proust, but he had somehow taken a short cut across the allotments and arrived at the same conclusions.

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

Proust goes on. I love him as much as ever — but between ourselves he is not a very impressive critic. Rather like Valentine's intelligent poodle with grapes. She adores grapes, and can do everything with them except bite them.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

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

John Kenneth Galbraith

When Paul's Foundations was published in the 1940s, readers experienced a kind of revelation that created a sensation. This brings to mind the post-WWI public's similar reaction to Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Critics compared Proust's prolific writings to those of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. But, what a difference in Proust's and Paul's dispositions!

Michael Szenberg