Writer Quotes by Marcel Proust

Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.

— Marcel Proust

“This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered.”

— Marcel Proust

“Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company.”

— Marcel Proust

“Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it.”

— Marcel Proust

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

— Marcel Proust

In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.

— Marcel Proust

“True life life at last discovered and illuminated the only life therefore really lived that life is literature.”

— Marcel Proust

“In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.”

— Marcel Proust

To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already…

— Marcel Proust

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to…

— Marcel Proust

“The impression is for the writer what experiment is for the scientist, with the difference that in the scientist the work of…

— Marcel Proust

“A new book was not one of a number of similar objects, but was like an individual man, unmatched, and with no…

— Marcel Proust

...a writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to…

— Marcel Proust

In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map…

— Marcel Proust

Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is…

— Marcel Proust

... But all the feelings that evoke in us the joy or the misfortune of a real person are only produced in…

— Marcel Proust

“In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind…

— Marcel Proust

“His life and family circle changed considerably between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Proust's brother Robert married and left the family…

— Marcel Proust

I perceived that to express those impressions, to write that essential book, which is the only true one, a great writer does…

— Marcel Proust

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he…

— Marcel Proust

That abominable and sensual act called reading the newspaper, thanks to which all the misfortunes and cataclysms in the universe over the…

— Marcel Proust

“As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us…

— Marcel Proust

“real books should be the offspring not of daylight and casual talk but of darkness and silence”

— Marcel Proust