Umberto Eco Quotes
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Our life is full of empty space.
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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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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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Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.
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Human beings are religious animals.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.
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The hand of God creates; it does not conceal.
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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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A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
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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.
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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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A secret is powerful when it is empty.
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You die, but most of what you have accumulated will not be lost; you are leaving a message in a bottle.
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I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper.
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How should we deal with intrusions of fiction into life, now that we have seen the historical impact that this phenomenon can have? … Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.
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Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.
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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.