The Novelist's Gift of Clairvoyance

Like many writers before me, I believe in coincidence and, sometimes, in the novelist's gift for clairvoyance—the word "gift" not being the exact term, for it implies a kind of superiority. No, it simply comes with the profession: the imaginative leaps this requires, the need to fix your mind on points of detail—to the point of obsession, in fact—so as not to lose the thread and give in to natural laziness—all this tension, this cerebral exercise may well lead in the long run to "flashes of intuition concerning events past and future," as the Larousse dictionary puts it, under the heading "clairvoyance."

From Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder (1999) (translated from the French by Joanna Kilmartin).