Umberto Eco Quotes
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A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection - not an invitation for hypnosis.
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Our life is full of empty space.
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When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.
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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.
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Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.
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The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.
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The hand of God creates; it does not conceal.
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I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
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Human beings are religious animals.
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Temi, Adso, i profeti e coloro disposti a morire per la verità, ché di solito fan morire moltissimo con loro, spesso prima di loro, talvolta al posto loro.
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In this world you either read or write, and writers write out of contempt for their colleagues, out of a desire to have something good to read once in a while.
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Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.
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As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
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Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
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The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.
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Berlusconi is a genius in communication. Otherwise, he would never have become so rich.
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I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper.
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Dan Brown is a character from 'Foucault's Pendulum!' I invented him. He shares my characters' fascinations - the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.
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I don't even have an E-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.
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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.
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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.
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I don't miss my youth. I'm glad I had one, but I wouldn't like to start over.
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Religion has nothing to do with God. It's a fundamental attitude of human beings, who ask about the origins of life and what happens after death. For many, the answer is a personal god. In my opinion, it's religion that produces God, not the other way round.
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A secret is powerful when it is empty.