Time Regained (In Search of Lost Time #7)

by Marcel Proust

The man of letters envies the painter, he would like to make sketches, to take notes, but if he does so it is a waste of time. When he writes, though, there is not one gesture of his characters, not one mannerism, one tone of voice, which has not been supplied to his inspiration by his memory, there is not one name of an invented character beneath which he cannot subsume sixty names of characters he has seen, one of whom has posed for the grimace, another for the monocle, this one for anger, that one for the conceited movement of the arm, etc. And then the writer realizes that while his dream of being a painter was not realizable in a conscious and deliberate manner, it has nevertheless been realized and that the writer, too, has created a sketch book without being aware of it.