“The business of the novelist
is not to relate great events,
but to make small ones interesting.”
– Arthur Schopenhauer

“The last celebrity to be consulted on his pre-apocalypse plans was a reclusive, mustachioed novelist not known for his interest in golf, tennis or bridge (though he had once tried checkers, and twice aided in the launch of a kite), a man who had spent the last fourteen years lying in a narrow bed under a pile of thinly woven woolen blankets writing an unusually long novel without an adequate bed lamp. Since the publication of its first volume in 1913, In Search of Lost Time had been hailed as a masterpiece, a French reviewer had compared the author to Shakespeare, an Italian critic had likened him to Stendhal, and an Austrian princess had offered her hand in marriage. Though he had never esteemed himself highly (“If only I could value myself more! Alas! It is impossible”) and had once referred to himself as a flea and to his writing as a piece of indigestible nougat, Marcel Proust had grounds for satisfaction. Even the British Ambassador to France, a man of wide acquaintance and cautious judgment, had deemed it appropriate to bestow on him a great if not directly literary honor, describing him as 'the most remarkable man I have ever met — because he keeps his overcoat on at dinner.'”
– Alain de Botton,
How Proust Can Change Your Life, 1998