I claim the right to take a stand once in a while.

I prefer insomnia to anaesthesia.

I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.

It's the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection.

I live quietly at home among my family and friends.

But democracy isn't a state of perfection. It has to be improved, and that means constant vigilance.

People with lots of doubts sometimes find life more oppressive and exhausting than others, but they're more energetic - they aren't robots.

But I don't think I have any particular talent for prediction, because when you have three or four elements in hand, you don't have to be a genius to reach certain conclusions.

There are some fundamental values it's impossible to be wrong about.

Eco sees the intellectual as an organizer of culture, someone who can run a magazine or a museum. An administrator, in fact. I think this is a melancholy situation for an intellectual.

Perfection spawns doctrines, dictators and totalitarian ideas.

Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.

The people who take society as an escape from work are putting it to its proper use

Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun.

A man of words and not of deeds Is like a garden full of weeds.

There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.

I am the least qualified person to comment on anyone playing the role of Batman since I so terribly destroyed the part.

But I think we are seeing a resurgence of the graphic ghost story like The Others, Devil's Backbone and The Sixth Sense. It is a return to more gothic atmospheric ghost storytelling.

True friends appear less moved than counterfeit.

You don't have to be perfect to be a popstar.

We are the only ones who can tell our stories because we are the only ones who have lived them.