Proust Quotes

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? (Manuel Puig)
A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness. View quote
John Kenneth Galbraith
A novelist who ranks with Proust, Kafka, Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism. View quote
Italo Svevo
Ideally I'd like to spend two evenings a week talking to Proust and another conversing with the Holy Ghost. View quote
Edna O'Brien
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. View quote
Edward St Aubyn
Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry. View quote
Eugenio Montale
Whatever may have been our final judgment on the strange novel of M. Marcel Proust, 'Du Côté de chez Swann,' which appeared in the year before the war-and the book at least had this obviously in common with a great work of literature, that it lent itself to judgment on many different planes-the persistent element in all our changing opinions was that it marked the arrival of a new sensibility. We were being made aware in new ways, induced to perceive existence in new relations. View quote
John Middleton Murry
The great writers-Marcel Proust, Anton Chekhov, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Max Weber, Samuel Beckett, George Orwell, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin and others-knew that thought is subversive. They challenged and critiqued the dominant narrative, assumptions and structures that buttress power. They freed us. They did not cater to the latest fashion of the academy or popular culture. They did not seek adulation. They did not build pathetic monuments to themselves. They elucidated difficult and hard truths. They served humanity. They lifted up voices the power elites seek to discredit, marginalize or crush. View quote
Chris Hedges
[You've said your material chooses you. ] That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman--the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote. View quote
Truman Capote
I've read Proust and Stendhal. That keeps you in your place. View quote
Françoise Sagan
If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation. (Anaïs Nin)
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. View quote
André Maurois
To allude negligently to Kafka, Yeats, Proust, Stendhal, or St. John of the Cross in a tone of of-course-you-know-them is canonical for Mademoiselle contributors, whatever the topic in hand. View quote
Mary McCarthy
Ah! Women... I met one yesterday on the Pont de l'Europe [in Paris, circa 1881 - Manet was walking through the city frequently with his friend Antonin Proust, but then already more or less cripple because of his syphilis]. She was walking the way only a Parisienne knows how to walk, but with an extra something, even more assured. I'll remember that. There are some things that will always be engraved on my mind. View quote
Édouard Manet
Even Morgan seems to me to be based on some hidden rock. Talking of Proust and Lawrence he said he'd prefer to be Lawrence; but much rather would be himself. He is aloof, serene, a snob, he says, reading masterpieces only. View quote
Virginia Woolf
kummel and have deep conversations about Plato and Kant while listening to classical music. Or she would spend the entire morning in the bathtub, with bubble-bath up to her chin, reading Proust. If you wanted to talk to her you had to do it in the bathroom. View quote
Joan Vollmer
In the words of Marcel Proust - and this applies to any woman in the world - if you can stay up and listen with a fair degree of attention to whatever garbage, no matter how stupid it is that they're coming out with, till ten minutes past four in the morning... you're in. View quote
Peter Cook
Werewolves were far more terrifying than vampires. It is probably the idea of seeing the human within the beast and knowing you can't reach it. It might as well be a great white shark. There is no sitting down and discussing Proust with it, which the traditional vampire model seems to leave room for. You can have a conversation. View quote
Glen Duncan
My mother was right: When you've got nothing left, all you can do is get into silk underwear and start reading Proust. View quote
Jane Birkin
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. View quote
Jessi Klein
As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination. (Alain de Botton)
After Proust, there are certain things that simply cannot be done again. He marks off for you the boundaries of your talent. View quote
Françoise Sagan
Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the present with the past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-PrTs there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past. View quote
Cyril Connolly
Herzen was closer to the truth when he said that every memory calls up a dozen others. The real miracle of Proust is the discipline with which he stemmed the flow. Everything is a Madeleine. View quote
Clive James
Life is too short, and Proust is too long. View quote
Anatole France