Karl Lagerfeld Quotes

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

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

I find it's impossible for me to read Proust.

Proust is a huge author for me.

I'd like to read all of Proust.

At some point, I picked up an old library copy of 'To The Lighthouse' someone had bought for 25 cents. I began to read and didn't stop until the sun had blistered my back. A mysterious rightness, a beautiful submerged truth had invaded me, one that has ever since seemed slightly beyond my grasp.

I'm sure Proust was a big bore.

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.

Being a literature major, you know, I'm very familiar with the ways symbolism is used in our sort of mythic tales of society, so anyone who is consciously trying to pull that off I think is really interesting and clearly very smart.

The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.

We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it.

I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.

To understand a literary style, consider what it omits.

I'm not one of those James Joyce intellectuals who can stand back and look at the whole edifice... It was a slow process for me to just crawl out of it, like a snake leaving his skin behind.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular.

I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.

Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.

Clarity is so important for Shakespeare.

Books like Munro's are so deeply personal and idiosyncratic that it feels like a violation to subject them to the crude business of committee meetings and PR releases; you might as well storm a butterfly den with a klieg light.

I have a boundless passion for Flaubert. It's unthinkable to me that someone might not have read 'Madame Bovary.' He writes with a scalpel. Everything has meaning. My students were not allowed not to like him!

If you word-spot James Joyce, you'll miss the entire experience.

The metaphors exist for the stories.

I don't feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.

Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.