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My mother was right: When you've got nothing left, all you can do is get into silk underwear and start reading Proust. -- Jane Birkin
After Proust, there are certain things that simply cannot be done again. He marks off for you the boundaries of your talent. -- Francoise Sagan
Bourbon does for me what the piece of cake did for Proust. -- Walker Percy
Proust's tea cake has nothing on one hour in a college dorm. -- Gloria Steinem
Proust had his madeleines; I am devastated by the scent of yeast bread rising. -- Bert Greene
Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting. -- Jean Cocteau
Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned. -- Samuel Beckett
Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear? -- Elizabeth Bowen
I know of no better definition of love than the one given by Proust - Love is space and time measured by the heart. -- Gian Carlo Menotti
Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else. -- Albert Camus
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.... -- Edward Abbey
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
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. -- Oliver Sacks
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. -- Anais Nin
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
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. -- Tyler Cowen
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. -- Alain de Botton
A large, still book is a piece of quietness, succulent and nourishing in a noisy world, which I approach and imbibe with "a sort of greedy enjoyment," as Marcel Proust said of those rooms of his old home whose air was "saturated with the bouquet of silence." -- Holbrook Jackson
By itself, an ordinary snapshot is no less banal than the petite madeleine in Proust's In Search of Lost Time... but as goad to memory, it is often the first integer in a sequence of recollections that has the power to deny time for the sake of love. -- Michael Lesy
Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth. -- Marcel Proust
I'm sure Proust was a big bore. -- Truman Capote
I find it's impossible for me to read Proust. -- Norman MacCaig
Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else's dirty water. -- Alexander Woollcott
A ton of Proust isn't worth an ounce of Ray Bradbury. -- J. G. Ballard
I've read Proust and Stendhal. That keeps you in your place. -- Francoise Sagan
You know, the more grown-up you are, the more you like Proust. -- Sonia Rykiel
If there was ever a bigger pansy than my father, it was Marcel Proust. -- Alison Bechdel
Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry. -- Eugenio Montale
The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce. -- Alberto Moravia
It is Proust's courtesy to spare the reader the embarrassment of believing himself cleverer than the author. -- Theodor Adorno
A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness. -- John Kenneth Galbraith
I have depth. I've read Proust. No, wait, that was Pooh. Winnie the Pooh. My bad" Charley Davidson. -- Darynda Jones
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes. -- Alain de Botton
A novelist who ranks with Proust , Kafka , Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism. -- Italo Svevo
I read "Remembrance of Things Past" in the original French. I never start the day without reading me some [Marcel] Proust. -- Dave Barry
Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the 'walks' of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence. -- Bruce Chatwin
To me, the idea of living this lifestyle is so boring that I would prefer to read Marcel Proust the whole time during a tour. -- Laurent Brancowitz
It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes. -- Alain de Botton
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
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. -- Jessi Klein
I'm 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. -- Jessi Klein
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
I love long sentences. My big heroes of fiction writing are Henry James and Proust - people who recognise that life doesn't consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications, qualifications and feelings. -- John Burnside
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
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
Proust has been dead since 1922, yet the annual appearance of his posthumous works has left him, to the reader, alive. Now there is nothing left to publish. Five years after his interment, Proust seems dead for the first time. -- Janet Flanner
The only real voyage consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes; in seeing the universe through the eyes of another, one hundred others-in seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees. Marcel Proust, translated by Kiyotesong -- Rob Brezsny
I started writing the one-sentence stories when I was translating 'Swann's Way.' There were two reasons. I had almost no time to do my own writing, but didn't want to stop. And it was a reaction to Proust's very long sentences. -- Lydia Davis
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. -- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
Both Proust and Joyce record the ways in which human perspectives can be transformed. In Portrait, Stephen Dedalus is constantly undergoing epiphanies, but their effects are transitory: the new synthetic complex quickly falls apart. Proust's characters, by contrast, often achieve lasting changes of perspective. -- Philip Kitcher
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
The moment in which the narrator, reaching for his boots, becomes vividly and lastingly aware of the finality of his grandmother's death is another such moment. It would be interesting to explore Proust's great novel from the perspective of seeing how stable synthetic complexes are formed and modified. -- Philip Kitcher
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. -- Edward St Aubyn
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. -- Truman Capote
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. -- Helen DeWitt
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
If I hadn't read all of Jane Austen and DH Lawrence, Tolstoy and Proust, as well as the more fun stuff, I wouldn't know how to break bad news, how to sympathise, how to be a friend or a lover, because I wouldn't have any idea what was going on in anybody else's mind. -- Sebastian Faulks
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. -- Glen Duncan
Proust writes, he remembers, physically. He depends on his body to give him the information that will bring him to the past. His book is called 'In Search of Lost Time,' and he does it through the senses. He does it through smell. He does it through feeling. He does it through texture. It is all physically driven, that language. -- Twyla Tharp
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. -- Jennifer Egan

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