The dominant question for us with regard to literature has become, 'What does this have to do with me, with life as I know it?' That's the question answered by all these books about how Proust was actually a neuroscientist or how Proust can teach you emotional intelligence.

Elif Batuman

In 1997, Alain de Botton published his book 'How Proust Can Change Your Life.' I was charmed by it. I remember using it in a course on cultural criticism for a graduate class that had a mix of theorists and creative writers.

Amitava Kumar

Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust - not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius, they are meant to be read out loud and loved.

Andre Aciman

Nothing would have shocked Proust more than to hear that his work was perceived as difficult or inaccessibly rarefied.

Andre Aciman

Proust is interested in minutiae because life, as he sees it, is seldom ever about things but about our impression of things, not about facts but about the interpretation of facts, not about one particular feeling but about a confluence of conflicting feelings. Everything is elusive in Proust because nothing is ever certain.

Andre Aciman

It is Proust's implacable honesty, his reluctance to cut corners or to articulate what might have been good enough or credible enough in any other writer that make him the introspective genius he is.

Andre Aciman

With Eric Rohmer - as with Mozart, Austen, James, and Proust - we need to remember that art is seldom about life, or not quite about life. Art is about discovery and design and reasoning with chaos.

Andre Aciman

I'd like to read all of Proust.

Ann Patchett

I grew up reading Proust all my life, and he's very dear to me.

Chantal Akerman

Fragrance takes you on a journey of time. You can walk down the street and pass someone and get taken back 20 years. It's very Proustian that way.

Daphne Guinness

I haven't read a word of Proust. And I listen obsessively to sports radio.

David Grann

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

The dominant question for us with regard to literature has become, 'What does this have to do with me, with life as I know it?' That's the question answered by all these books about how Proust was actually a neuroscientist or how Proust can teach you emotional intelligence.

Elif Batuman

Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time,' especially 'Time Regained,' made me think differently about what the novel is and can do. Then I forgot about it, then reread it and remembered again.

Elif Batuman

I didn't go to university; I hardly went to school, but I grew up among people well versed in Henry James and Proust, and just felt this endless, total inadequacy.

Emma Tennant

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

Eugenio Montale

I identify myself as what I am. I'm half Jewish, like Proust. I have no other way to put it.

Francisco Goldman

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

Francoise Sagan

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

Francoise Sagan

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

My interior is very, very dense - Proustian-looking, sort of Henry James. The walls are covered in pictures, and I transformed the big drawing room into a library lined with books.

Hamish Bowles