Proust has been dead since 1922, yet the annual appearance of his posthumous works has left him, to the reader, alive. Now there is nothing left to publish. Five years after his interment, Proust seems dead for the first time.

I act as a sponge. I soak it up and squeeze it out in ink every two weeks.

Women have invented nothing in all that, except the men who were born as male babies and grew up to be men big enough to be killed fighting.

She had storms all her life, but she died peacefully.

The German passion for bureaucracy -- for written and signal forms . . . to move about, to work, to exist -- is like a steel pin pinning each French individual to a sheet of paper, the way an entomologist pins each specimen insect . . .

... people who don't want something are less likely to get it than people who do want something.

Genius is a talent only for living, those who possess it have little gift for dying.