Commonplace Book

'Now we will have to give this photographer an exemplary name, because the right name helps a great deal and indicates that the character will "live on." These semantic affinities between characters and their names drove Flaubert to despair. He spent two years finding Madame Bovary's first name, Emma. For this photographer of ours we don't know what to make up until, stumbling upon that golden little book of George Gissing's titled By the Ionian Sea, we discover the prestigious name "Paparazzo." The photographer will be called Paparazzo. He will never know that he bears the honoured name of a hotel-keeper from somewhere in Calabria, about whom Gissing speaks with gratitude and admiration. But names have a destiny of their own.'

from an entry, dated June 1958, in The Via Veneto Papers by Ennio Flaiano