The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.
Milan KunderaNo episode is a priori condemned to remain an episode forever, for every event, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and thus changing into a story or an adventure. Episodes are like land mines. The majority of them never explode, but the most unremarkable of them may someday turn into a story that will prove fateful to you.
Milan Kundera