Marcel Proust Quotes

No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books.

The experience of reading a book is always unique. I believe that you render a version of the story, when you read a book, in a way that is unique and special to each person who reads it.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Each reader projects their own version of the experience inside their skull as they go along. It's probably true that no two people read exactly the same book.

We buy a copy of 'Gravity's Rainbow,' say, and we carry our copy home. We open it; we fall into it. And it is here that the word 'copy' fails. Because what I experience when I read 'Gravity's Rainbow,' or 'Beloved,' or 'The Moviegoer,' is not at all a 'copy' of what you experience when you read the same novel.

Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

Everybody interprets things differently with their own perception, and I want poetry to pull out of them their own feelings.

There's nothing particularly unique about my experiences except that they're my experiences.

Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life.

There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because, to some degree, I projected upon it.

With most of the songs and music that I've composed, irrespective of the myriad videos made, I was always careful not to overly define the experience, leaving room for people to internalize things for themselves, making their experience more integral.

Songs are about whatever you want them to be about. For me it might mean something completely different than what it means to you. So I'd say it's about whatever the listener thinks it's about.

A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers.

All experience is subjective.

Ultimately, anything is just what you make of it.

People relate to songs so differently. No matter what it's about in reality, people create their own meaning behind it and connect with it on their own terms.

No matter what we talk about, we are talking about ourselves.

I can't say what people use the experience of listening to songs for, but I would never tell somebody what it is supposed to mean. That defeats the purpose of making it. Hopefully, whoever connects with it connects with it in their own way, and it can mean whatever it is supposed to mean to them.

A poem, once it's written, is meant to be read with the inner voice of the person who reads it.

When someone starts talking to me about the truth, what I hear is what they're telling me about themselves.

Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

It's always dangerous to prescribe an idea on other people. I think people's interactions with art are their own, and will be far more interesting and sophisticated than anything that I could come up with.

Reality! But what does this word mean? Each has his own reality. I draw upon my personal reality upon the dark side of myself, my unconscious.