Memories of melodies

The beautiful things we shall write if we have the talent are inside us, indistinct, like the memory of a melody which delights us though we are unable to recapture its outline. Those who are obsessed by the blurred memory of truths they have never known are the men who are gifted.... Talent is like a sort of memory which will enable them to finally bring this indistinct music closer to them, to hear it clearly, to note it down.

Marcel Proust
Quoted in Lynn Freed, "Doing Time: My years in the creative-writing gulag," Harper's Magazine, July 2005