Norman MacCaig Quotes

Proust is a huge author for me.

I'd like to read all of Proust.

I like the language in Proust but not the context.

I grew up reading Proust all my life, and he's very dear to me.

And it's impossible for me to read Henry James.

Proust is a hero of mine. I read 'A la recherche' in one go, and I'm a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact, reading it on my own and being my main company. I think Proust is the most intelligent person to ever have written a novel.

How about Proust's In Search of Lost Time?" Tamaru asked. "If you've never read it this would be a good opportunity to read the whole thing." "Have you read it?" "No, I haven't been in jail, or had to hide out for a long time. Someone once said unless you have those kinds of opportunities, you can't read the whole of Proust.

I'm sure Proust was a big bore.

Oh yes, my generation liked to be in some pain when they read. The harder it was, the more good we believed it was doing us.

There's nothing like taking Proust to the beach and daydreaming along to it.

Nothing would have shocked Proust more than to hear that his work was perceived as difficult or inaccessibly rarefied.

No efforts of mine could avail to make the book easy reading.

My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.

To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.

The paradox of modernism is, writers make the decision to work with the continuous present, and to work with... stream of consciousness, as it's called, for emotional reasons, and the main emotional reason is verisimilitude. I mean, this is what surprises people: Life is not in the simple past.

I only got 'War and Peace' on the third attempt.

If you ever want to understand multitasking in prose, James Joyce is your man.

My life reads more like Proust than a tabloid.

There are so many books I want to read. Difficult books. That's what I intend to do and what I'm longing for.

I just can't read, the way other people can, these tediously elaborated books.

French schools follow a national curriculum that includes arduous surveys of French philosophy and literature. Frenchmen then spend the rest of their lives quoting Proust to one another, with hardly anyone else catching the references.

You know, the more grown-up you are, the more you like Proust.

[On Gertrude Stein's Making of Americans:] I doubt if all the people who should read it will read it for a great while yet, for it is in such a limited edition, and reading it is anyhow a sort of permanent occupation.

I always want to try to bring something fresh to every book. It's getting harder instead of easier. I feel like I work harder with each book. But I don't want it to show on the pages, that's for sure.

I find that nowadays it's just gotten harder for me to read for fun. It feels like all of my reading is research-based.