Marcel Proust Quotes

In reality, each reader reads only what is already within himself.  The book is only a kind of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable him to discover in himself what he could not have found but for the aid of the book.

To write the essential book, the only true book, a great writer does not need to invent because the book already exists inside each one of us and merely needs translation.

For the writer as well as for the painter, style is not a question of technique, but of vision.

Happiness is healthy for the body, but it is sorrow which enhances the forces of the mind.

Although time changes people, it cannot change the image we have already made of them.

Lies are essential to humanity. They play perhaps as great a role as the pursuit of pleasure, and are indeed controlled by this pursuit.