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“... In the spring of 1920 Marcel Proust was fretting because the good ‘Gaston’ (Gallimard, his post-war publisher) had been unforgivably slow in arranging for translations of his now successful novel to be started. In the past 12 months Du Côté de chez Swann had been published for a second time (the little-noticed earlier edition was in 1913) and A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs for the first time; and Proust had, strangely, won the Prix Goncourt, a corrupt award which he had wanted but which generally goes to works of uncomplicated mediocrity ...”

“... Proust wrote too many letters: he thought so and so anyone might think, as Philip Kolb’s expanding series of annual volumes edges towards the writer’s death, in 1922. Sheer numbers would not have mattered had they been stronger letters, but Proust’s correspondence is too much of it mechanical or emptily ingratiating, the one remaining exercise of the social virtues by a man who had taken to his bedroom (with occasional querulous sorties late at night to the Ritz Hotel) in order to be alone with his asthma and the prodigiously radiating manuscript of his novel ...”

“... What was it Proust said about paradise? That all paradises are lost paradises? That the only true paradise is a lost paradise? That it isn’t paradise until it’s lost? That paradise is a name for a favourite form of loss? He can plausibly be read as saying any of these things, and perhaps more than one at once ...”

“... One of Proust’s friends is supposed to have said of him that beauty did not really interest him: it had too little to do with desire. A remark which is not entirely lacking insight. It might be said that the relation of the two fascinated Proust as they had fascinated no writer before him, and he perceived that the kinds of pleasure involved in the two concepts were indivisible ...”

“... Much or the last volume of Proust’s novel is devoted to life in Paris during the First World War. Proust, the least chauvinistic of writers, is nevertheless so moved by patriotic sentiment as to transgress the convention which keeps a fictional world separate from its author: In this book in which there is not a single incident which is not fictitious, not a single character who is a real person in disguise ...”

“... and set up his own company in 1987. At one point, he was considering doing postgraduate work on Proust; he said in one of the lectures now published as Sept conférences sur Marcel Proust that he had been ‘tempted to conduct … a university exercise that one calls a thesis’, and the wording alone tells us a ...”

“... I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust,’ a waiting femme fatale says when Philip Marlowe hits his office in The Big Sleep (1939). Marlowe’s response: ‘Who’s he?’ ‘A French writer,’ she says, ‘a connoisseur in degenerates. You wouldn’t know him.’ She couldn’t have said the same to Philo Vance, S ...”

“... it either. An example would be Walter Benjamin’s wonderful remark about missed experiences in Proust: None of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us – this and nothing else. The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but ...”

“... so famous that it’s hard to retain the idea of its risk. The narrator (and to some extent Proust himself) decides to build a whole long novel on an involuntary memory. Involuntary here means not only unintended but barred from the realm of intention. Whatever it is, it won’t happen if you try to make it happen. There is an element of myth and drama ...”

“... Proust’s unpublished work does not exist,’ Bernard de Fallois wrote in 1954. Provocative words, since he was introducing a whole volume of such material, and two years earlier had brought out Jean Santeuil, an unfinished novel Proust worked on between 1895 and 1899. De Fallois was trying to suggest, with a little too much bravado, that all Proust’s writing, early and late, published and unpublished, should be considered part of his great novel, À la recherche du temps perdu ...”

“... It’s really​ a miniature novel,’ we read in the introduction to this collection of Marcel Proust’s newly discovered letters, ‘C’est un vrai petit roman.’ It’s such a perfect novel that it looks like a hoax. Twenty-six letters from Proust to his upstairs neighbours at 102 boulevard Haussmann, none of the letters heard of before, many of them complaining about the noise: how could this not be a parody? And isn’t it too broad a stroke to make the husband a dentist? The wife a delicate, suffering lady who plays the harp? Please ...”

“... Hemingway and Pound and Rilke and Gide and Joyce and the entire gratin of 20th-century literature. Marcel Proust was said to have come, once, in the middle of the night, and one can only speculate about the outcome. Two hundred pages, at a rough guess. I first learned about all this lying flat on my back one Saturday morning trying to disperse the effects ...”

“... He joined the club of dreamers. On the basis of no statistical evidence at all, I suspect that Proust is at the head of the list, at least in Europe and the Americas, of authors people dream of reading, easily outclassing those former champions Tolstoy and Joyce. I also suspect that chiefly novelists enter this kind of dream, that those who think of ...”

“... a more figurative bent, together with raids on the purple and the stylish. It also has a raid on Proust’s purple: ‘Marcel Proust has described bells as being “resilient and ferruginous”, but in that small room in that pension, with the pale green band of light from the clock radio, they were bold and ...”

“... up with particular delicacy. One of Frame’s previous works was called A Long Weekend with Marcel Proust: a short weekend with Penelope’s Hat suggests to me that such time as this author has spent with Proust has not been time lost. The sense of smell is unusually prevalent for an author writing in ...”