(...) "sometimes I try to concentrate on the story I would like to write, and I realise that what interests me is something else entirely or, rather, not anything precise but everything that goes not fit in with what I ought to write - the relationship between a given argument and all its possible variants and alternatives, everything that can happen in time and space. This is a devoting and destructive obsession, which is enough to render writing impossible. In order to combat it, I try to limit the field of what I have to say, divide it into still more limited fields, then subdivide these again and so on and on. then another kind of vertigo seizes me, that of the detail of the detail of the detail, and I am drawn into the infinitesimal, the infinitely small, just as I was previously lost in the infinitely vast."

Italo Calvino - Exactitude on the book Six Memos for the Next Millenium