A man who, night after night, falls like a lump of lead upon his bed, and ceases to live until the moment when he wakes and rises, will such a man ever dream of making, I do not say great discoveries, but even minute observations upon sleep? He barely knows that he does sleep. A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness. A memory without fault is not a very powerful incentive to studying the phenomena of memory.

Proust had a close relationship with his mother. Literary historians and critics have ascertained that apart from Ruskin Proust's chief literary influences included Saint-Simon Montaigne Stendhal Flaubert George Eliot Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy. Paris: Bernard Grasset:

1919 Pastiches et mélanges ("Pastiches and mixtures").

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (French pronunciation: ​[maʁsɛl pʁust]; 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922) was a French novelist critic and essayist best known for his monumental novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past).