- In Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946), Vivian Rutledge (Lauren Bacall) tells Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart), "So you do get up. I was beginning to think you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust."[36]
- Andy Warhol's 1955 book A La Recherche du Shoe Perdu marked Warhol's "transition from commercial to gallery artist".[37]
- The British television series Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969–1974) references the book and its author in two episodes.[38] In the "Fish Licence" sketch, Mr. Praline mentions that Proust "had an 'addock" as a pet fish, and warns, when his listener laughs, "if you're calling the author of À la recherche du temps perdu a looney, I shall have to ask you to step outside!" In another sketch entitled "The All-England Summarize Proust Competition", contestants are required to summarize all of Proust's seven volumes of the novel in 15 seconds.[38]
- Science fiction author Gene Wolfe cited Proust as an influence, saying "Proust, of course, was obsessed with some of the same things I deal with in The Book of the New Sun – memory and the way memory affects us."[39] The opening line of his novella The Fifth Head of Cerberus is a parphrase of the first sentence of Swann's Way.
- The 1998 television series Serial Experiments Lain concludes with an allusion to the madeleine episode of Lost Time.
- In Larry McMurtry's 1999 novel Duane's Depressed, Duane Moore's therapist assigns him the task of reading the Proust novel.[40] She tells him, "The reason I made you read Proust is because it's still the greatest catalogue of the varieties of disappointment human beings feel."[41]
- In the third episode of the third season of The Sopranos, "Fortunate Son" (2001), Tony Soprano has a breakthrough about the role the smell of meat plays in triggering his panic attacks, which his therapist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, likens to Proust's madeleines.[42]
- In Brad Bird's Ratatouille (2007), the titular dish inspires a childhood flashback for food critic Anton Ego (Peter O'Toole), in a reference to the episode of the madeleine.[43]
- In Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 (2009), the main character Aomame spends an entire fall locked in an apartment, where the book becomes her only entertainment. Aomame's days are spent eating, sleeping, working out, staring off the balcony to the city below and the Moon above, and slowly reading through Lost Time.[44]
- In Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being (2013), a French edition of the novel is turned into a diary by a handicraft saleswoman in Harajuku. The diary is bought by protagonist Nao Yasutani, and later discovered by Ruth when it washes ashore in British Columbia.[45]
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