If You Want To Know How Much

The Close-up Has No Equivalent In A Narrative Fashioned Of Words. Literature Is Totally Lacking In Any Working Method To Enable It To Isolate A Single Vastly Enlarged Detail In Which One Face Comes Forward To Underline A State Of Mind Or Stress The Importance Of A Single Detail In Comparison With The Rest. As A Narrative Device, The Ability To Vary The Distance Between The Camera And The Object May Be A Small Thing Indeed, But It Makes For A Notable Difference Between Cinema And Oral Or Written Narrative, In Which The Distance Between Language And Image Is Always The Same.

Who Are We, Who Is Each One Of Us, If Not A Combination Of Experiences, Information, Books We Have Read, Things Imagined? Each Life Is An Encyclopedia, A Library, An Inventory Of Objects, A Series Of Styles, And Everything Can Be Constantly Shuffled And Reordered In Every Way Conceivable.

You Are About To Begin Reading Italo Calvino's New Novel, If On A Winter's Night A Traveler.

Memory Is Redundant: It Repeats Signs So That The City Can Begin To Exist.

Your First Book Already Defines You, While You Are Really Far From Being Defined. And This Definition Is Something You May Then Carry With You For The Rest Of Your Life, Trying To Confirm It Or Extend Or Correct Or Deny It; But You Can Never Eliminate It.