"Good art challenges its own limits. In Zona, Dyer questions both Stalker and his own work and promotes this attitude to art in his readers. It is anti-elitist and anti-esoteric (you don’t even have to have seen Stalker), appealing to all readers. Unlike much criticism, it doesn’t seek to analyse or explain the value of a masterpiece. In fact, it stages a critique of endgame literature that caters to the need to understand art over a desire to engage with it. Not that Dyer necessarily holds that high art means hard work. He is both puritan and voluptuary, believing above all in the personal experience of a work as its own and greatest value. It’s art for art’s and art for your own sake. There is no point in all this, as he says of Zona, ‘the exercise is, of course, its own purpose’." - Adriano

"At the heart of Stalker is a discourse of desire, centred in a Room inside the Zone where dreams come true. The Room is a place we can pool our wishes and it is as real as any other promise-delivering device. Tarkovsky’s hostility to symbolic readings of his films extended to questions about the meaning of the Zone itself: "I’m reduced to a state of fury and despair by such questions. The Zone doesn’t symbolise anything, any more than anything else does in my films: the zone is the zone, it’s life."" - Adriano