Like a blazing comet, I've traversed infinite nights, interstellar spaces of the imagination, voluptuousness and fear.

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.

I felt like an impostor, taking all that money for reciting ten or twelve lines of nonsense a day.

I work all over the world. I have a very, very full life.

There's nothing new about the government protecting corporations and calling it the freeing of the world or bringing democracy to bereft nations.

Thinking doesn't guarantee that we won't make mistakes. But not thinking guarantees that we will.

A non-violent revolution is not a program of seizure of power. It is a program of transformation of relationships, ending in a peaceful transfer of power.

Many Americans don't mourn in public anymore - we don't wear black, we don't beat our chests and wail.

On New Year's Eve he ould make a resolution to recover some his previous scepticism, but until then he would do as the Romans do, and smile at people even if he disapproved of them

I was 11 or 12 years old when I first saw 'Reservoir Dogs.' I remember after I saw that film, I kept renting it from the video store because I wanted all of my friends to see it.

A faith is something you die for; a doctrine is something you kill for; there is all the difference in the world.

Our most dangerous tendency is to expect too much of government, and at the same time do for it too little.