Writing Quotes by Marcel Proust

The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.

— Marcel Proust

“breathed into this quite ordinary prose a kind of life, continuous and full of feeling. My”

— Marcel Proust

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

— Marcel Proust

“A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on.”

— Marcel Proust

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

— 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

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

— 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

Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers…

— 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

“It may be that I might have inferred from the pages that life teaches us to diminish the value of what we…

— 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

... we made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books,…

— 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

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

— Marcel Proust

“It was evident to me then that I existed in the same manner as all other men, that I must grow old,…

— 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

“And more even than the painter, the writer, in order to achieve volume and substance, in order to attain to generality and,…

— Marcel Proust

“Whatever one may say, writing a novel is a very different thing from living one. All the same our lives are not…

— Marcel Proust

These dreams reminded me that, since I wished some day to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort…

— Marcel Proust

“In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one…

— Marcel Proust

“The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial…

— Marcel Proust

Pour e crire ce livre essentiel, le seul livre vrai, un grand e crivain n'a pas, dans le sens courant, a' l'inventer…

— 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

“...guided the sentence that was drawing to an end towards that which was waiting to begin, now hastening, now slackening the pace…

— Marcel Proust