Raymond Carver og Tom Jenkins forsøker å definere "talent" (via Tolstoj)..

In his "Introduction to the Works of Guy de Maupassant," Tolstoy wrote that talent is "the capacity to direct intense concentrated attention on the subject ... a gift of seeing what others have not seen." We think the writers included in these pages have done this, have directed "intense concentration" on their subject, seeing clearly and forcefully what others have not seen. On the other hand, considering some of these stories and their insistence on depicting the "familiar", we think something else is just as often at work - another definition of "talent," perhaps. We'd like to suggest that talent, even genius, is also the gift of seeing what everyone else has seen, but seeing it more clearly, from all sides. Art in either case.

Fra introduksjonen til American short story masterpieces, en antologi av Raymond Carver og Tom Jenkins, Dell Publishing 1987.