Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.

Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.

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.

Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can’t make anything.

You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before

A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.