A Pleasing Thought

"After the publication of The Name of the Rose, the first movie director who proposed making a film out of it... told me, 'Your book seems conceived expressly for a movie script, since the dialogues are just the right length.'At first I did not understand why. Then I remembered that before I'd begun writing, I had drawn hundreds of labyrinths and plans of abbeys, so that I knew how long it would take two characters to go from one place to another, conversing as they went. Thus, the layout of my fictional world dictated the length of the dialogues."

--Umberto Eco, "Writing from Left to Right," in Confessions of a Young Novelist (2011) 

Monastery in Monreale, Sicily, ^ the town where my grandmother born (father's mother)