Top 391 Quotes & Sayings by Umberto Eco - Page 2

I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.

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

The grandeur of Jerusalem is also... its problem.

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

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.

The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon... The book has been thoroughly tested, and it's very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes.

My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.

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.

There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven't read, that we haven't had the time to read.

I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper.

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.

There are books on our shelves we haven't read and doubtless never will, that each of us has probably put to one side in the belief that we will read them later on, perhaps even in another life.

Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.

If people buy my books for vanity, I consider it a tax on idiocy.

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.

With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the U.S.A. and China.

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

I write what I write.

We invented the car, and it made it easier for us to crash and die. If I gave a car to my grandfather, he would die in five minutes, while I have grown up slowly to accept speed.

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

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.

It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.

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.

At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.

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.

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 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.

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

Conspiracies do exist. Probably in this moment in New York there is an economic group making a conspiracy in order to buy three banks. But if they succeed, they are immediately discovered.

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 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.

Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.

But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.

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.

Today, political events are nullified unless they're on TV.

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.

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.

Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis.

The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.

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.

I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel.

I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.

Berlusconi is a genius in communication. Otherwise, he would never have become so rich.

I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.

When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.

We like lists because we don't want to die.

One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.

You die, but most of what you have accumulated will not be lost; you are leaving a message in a bottle.

It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.

Human beings are religious animals.

Certainly, light fiction exists and encompasses mysteries or second-class romance novels, books that are read on the beach, whose only aim is to entertain. These books are not concerned with style or creativity - instead they are successful because they are repetitive and follow a template that readers enjoy.

Our most noted satirists are true columnists, and their opinions can be worth more than any well-documented expose.

There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism.

Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.

I was a fervent Catholic, and I belonged to the national organizations, even becoming one of the national leaders, until the age of 21, 22.

There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.

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.

The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.

The wise man does not discriminate; he gathers all the shreds of light, from wherever they may come.

If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.