Umberto Eco
Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.
If people buy my books for vanity, I consider it a tax on idiocy.
After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs.
We are a pluralist civilisation because we allow mosques to be built in our countries, and we are not going to stop simply because Christian missionaries are thrown into prison in Kabul. If we did so, we, too, would become Taliban.
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.
I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.
A secret is powerful when it is empty.
Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.
I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.
The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.
Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.
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.
I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare's tragedies.
Young people do not watch television; they are on the Internet.
A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.
Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.
My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn't visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.
As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see.
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.
Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.
It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.
Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.
When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.
I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience.
I write what I write.
It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.
The most interesting letters I received about 'The Name of the Rose' were from people in the Midwest that maybe didn't understand exactly, but wanted to understand more and who were excited by this picture of a world which was not their own.
There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.
It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.
Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis.
Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he was finding India but discovered America. History is full of events that happened because of an imaginary tale.
Today, political events are nullified unless they're on TV.
The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.
Many people who no longer go to church end up falling prey to superstition.
With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the U.S.A. and China.
When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.
The grandeur of Jerusalem is also... its problem.
There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism.
A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appears to be funny.
At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.
When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.
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.
It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.
Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.
I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper.