Lecture, écriture, littérature:
"En réalité, chaque lecteur est, quand il lit, le propre lecteur de soi-même." / "In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self."
"La lecture est une amitié." / "Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude." / "There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book." / "No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book."
"Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals."
"Le style, pour l'écrivain aussi bien que pour le peintre, est une question non de technique mais de vision." / "For the writer as well as for the painter, style is not a question of technique, but of vision."
"The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance." / "I blame the newspapers because every day they call our attention to insignificant things, while three or four times in our lives,we read books that contain essential things."
"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 duty and task of a writer are those of translator."
"Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way."
"A language which we do not know is a fortress sealed."
"Everybody calls "clear" those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own." / "One says the things which one feels the need to say, and which the other will not understand: one speaks for oneself alone."
"The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter." / "Les beaux livres sont écrits dans une sorte de langue étrangère." / "Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language." [à comparer à Gilles Deleuze: "A great writer is always like a foreigner in the language which he expresses himself, even if this is his native tongue. At the limit, he draws his strength from a mute and unknown minority that belongs only to him. He is a foreigner in his own language: he does not mix another language with his own language, he carves out a nonpreexistent foreign language within his own language. He makes the language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur."]
"La creación del mundo no ocurrió al principio de los tiempos, ocurre todos los días."
"Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth."
"Les passions sont comme des bibliothèques où le vulgaire séjourne sans connaître les trésors qu'elles contiennent."
"A writer's works, like the water in an artesian well, mount to a height which is in proportion to the depth to which suffering has penetrated his soul."
"A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author."
"A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu."
Beauté, solitude:
"La vraie beauté est si particulière, si nouvelle, qu'on ne la reconnaît pas pour la beauté."
"Par l'art seulement nous pouvons sortir de nous, savoir ce que voit un autre de cet univers qui n'est pas le même que le nôtre, et dont les paysages nous seraient restés aussi inconnus que ceux qu'il peut y avoir dans la lune." / "Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees."
"Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms."
"Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best."
"If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time."
"Il y a des moments de la vie où une sorte de beauté naît de la multiplicité des ennuis qui nous assaillent."
"We construct our lives for one person, and when at length it is ready to receive her that person does not come; presently she is dead to us, and we live on, prisoners within the walls which were intended only for her."
"The comfort of reclusion, the poetry of hibernation."
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D'autres citations de Marcel Proust, se lisent ici:
https://blogs.mediapart.fr/wawa/blog/200321/marcel-proust
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