Rather than regret for what I have written, I feel regret for what I shall never be able to read.

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 was never ready and could you see it in the way time collapsed in my syntax? Because melancholia is the inability to sequentialize.

Some want to be writers when life permits it. There is no part-time in being a writer. It’s an all-in way of living your life through words and feelings scratched out with a pen.

No, I am not bitter, I am not hateful, and I am not unforgiving. I just don't like you.

The nearer the bone the sweeter the meat.

Chess reflects the real world in miniature. Endeavor, struggle, success, and defeat - they are part of each game ever played.

Decades ago, Gerhard Richter found a painterly philosopher's stone. Like Jackson Pollock before him, he discovered something that had been in painting all along, always overlooked or discounted.

God bless perseverance. Because it's not easy.

Somehow I wasn't completely crucified by the critics. I don't know how or why, I probably should've been.

The truth isn't meant to be pretty, that's for beauty pageants.

The inevitable consequence of poverty is dependence.