np

Quoted, by Naipaul in his Nobel winning lecture

"I will end as I began, with one of the marvellous little essays of Proust in Against Sainte-Beuve. "The beautiful things we shall write if we have talent," Proust says, "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 this 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 finally to bring this indistinct music closer to them, to hear it clearly, to note it down..."
Talent, Proust says. I would say luck, and much labour."

Reading a series of essays by Naipaul on writing, fiction, identity and being situated in the post colonial space, as best defines his history and background, not only physical, but cultural, mental, societal.