Umberto Eco Quotes

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.

There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.

A book is a fragile creature. It suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands.

He had prepared his death much earlier, in his imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was planning the reality of that death.

Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards; those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and those bastards always talk about the purity of race.

To read a paper book is another experience: you can do it on a ship, on the branch of a tree, on your bed, even if there is a blackout.

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

The only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

The real hero is always a hero by mistake.

A secret is powerful when it is empty.

The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.

It is obvious that the newspaper produces the opinion of the readers.

If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity.

Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respiration - acquire the pace. Otherwise you stop right away.

I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.

I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources -- Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake.

Is it possible to say "It was a beautiful morning at the end of November" without feeling like Snoopy?

National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.

I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don't tell anybody what I'm doing. I'm living in my private world. And it's a great sensation.

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.

From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.

An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original.

People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.

I have a good memory. But I would be interested in memory even if I had a bad memory, because I believe that memory is our soul. If we lose our memory completely, we are without a soul.

As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.

History is a blood-drenched enigma and the world an error.

What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.

The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.

The truth is an anagram of an anagram.

libraries are fascinating places: sometimes you feel you are under the canopy of a railway station, and when you read books about exotic places there's a feeling of travelling to distant lands

Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis. The most exciting letters I received were from people in places like that.

The good of a book lies in its being read.

Man's principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility?

I enjoyed your article, but I preferred my own.

Contemporary societies have lost the sense of the feast but have kept the obscure drive for it.

I felt no passion, no jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as emotionless as an aluminum pot.

For many years I have devoted articles and essays to newspapers, from the inside. So criticism of the newspapers was a topic that I practiced for a long time.

Your masters at Oxford have taught you to idolize reason, drying up the prophetic capacities of your heart!

I consider always the adult life to be the continuous retrieval of childhood.

I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only one who confesses.

I have always been fascinated by paranoid people imagining conspiracies. I am fascinated by this in a critical way.

American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100oC

Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.

There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.

A sure sign of a lunatic is that sooner or later, he brings up the Templars.

Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.