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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I admire Turgenev, Camus, Proust and Shakespeare, but I've also learnt a lot about writing from composers and artists.
My mother was right: When you've got nothing left, all you can do is get into silk underwear and start reading Proust.
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.
There's nothing like taking Proust to the beach and daydreaming along to it.
As far as I can see, the best writers in the last two hundred years have been Whitman, Rilke, Proust, Kafka. Their best works: 'Leaves of Grass - 1855;' 'Duino Elegies;' 'The Captive & The Fugitive;' 'The Castle.'
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.
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.
After college, I went on a real big classics kick. Read everything by Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, Proust, Dostoevsky. And that classics train dropped me off at 'Dracula.' Halfway through it, I understood I'd never be going back, never 'leaving' the genre again. Since then, I've been on a fairly strict horror diet.
I like the language in Proust but not the context.
There was a moment when designers draped in ermine would be reading Proust, or pretending to.
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.
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.
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?
I want my thoughts to be an incentive for the reader to give his or her own thoughts. After I wrote 'Proust and the Squid,' I received truly hundreds of letters - I'm still receiving them - and the letters that I wrote back helped me formulate my thinking around things I know are important to others.
The littlest thing can have the strongest connection when you're grieving. Your Proustian, poetic nerve is turned up to ten.
I find it's impossible for me to read Proust.
French schools follow a national curriculum that includes arduous surveys of French philosophy and literature. Frenchmen then spend the rest of their lives quoting Proust to one another, with hardly anyone else catching the references.
Proust is a huge author for me.
Sometimes I wish I could go back through time to meet Proust, just so I could give him my asthma inhaler. The poor guy.
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.
My life reads more like Proust than a tabloid.
Pop music can get inside us and enter our memory bubbles. It provides those true Proustian moments, unlocking sensations, unlocking our imaginations. Music inspired me as a filmmaker.
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.
