[He] taught me many things: how to create a sentence, how to think about language and all its devices as an orchestra and search of a musical score, how to analyze a text and understand how it is constructed and why... He taught me to read and write again, but this time I knew what I was doing, why, and what for. And above all how. He never tired of telling me that in literature there is only one real theme: not what is narrated, but how it is narrated. The rest, he said, was decoration.