Quotes about Proust

We weren't idealistic about much, we children of the 1950s, but we were certainly idealistic about art. We went into it with the highest kind of ambition — not to get rich or to impress women, but to make our mark as Proust and Joyce had made their mark.

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

So even that marvelous, long remembrances of life all the time in the world to just sit there or lie there or walk about slowly remembering all the details of life which now because a million lightyears away have taken on the aspect (as they must've for Proust in his sealed room) of pleasant movies brought up at will and projected for further study ? And pleasure ? As I imagine God to be doing this very minute, watching his own movie, which is us.

As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.

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.