A collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the grav….

Until I saw Chardin's painting, I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house, in the half-cleared table, in the corner of a ta….

Theoretically, we know that the world turns, but in fact we do not notice it, the earth on which we walk does not seem to move andwe live on in peace….

I have a horror of sunsets; they're so romantic, so operatic..

The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamo….

Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is inexistent; but, if so, we feel that these phrases of music, these conce….

She poured out Swann's tea, inquired "Lemon or cream?" and, on his answering "Cream, please," said to him with a laugh: "A cloud!" And as he pronounc….

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love..

After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more….

To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The du….

When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation..

Unkind people imagine themselves to be inflicting pain on someone equally unkind..

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude..

If, I can someday see M. Claude Monet's garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of flowers as of colours and tone….

Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect..

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to d….

If there is one thing more difficult than submitting oneself to a regime it is refraining from imposing it on other people..

... in love, barriers cannot be destroyed from the outside by the one to whom the cause despair, no matter what he does; and it isonly when he is no ….

There is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer..

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

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