Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outsi… - Italo Calvino

…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

"Once the process of falsification is set in motion, it won't stop. We're in a country where everything that can be falsified has been falsified: paintings in museums, gold ingots, bus tickets. The counterrevolution and the revolution fight with salvos of falsification: the result is that nobody can be sure what is true and what is false, the political police simulate revolutionary actions and the revolutionaries disguise themselves as policemen."

And who gains by it, in the end?"

It's too soon to say. We have to see who can best exploit the falsifications, their own and those of the others: whether it's the police or our organization."

The taxi driver is pricking up his ears. You motion Corinna to restrain herself from making unwise remarks.

But she says, "Don't be afraid. This is a fake taxi. What really alarms me, though, is that there is another taxi following us."

Fake or real?"

Fake, certainly, but I don't know whether it belongs to the police or to us."

My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language. . . . Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world — qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.