Umberto Eco Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.
-
Our life is full of empty space.
-
Human beings are religious animals.
-
The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.
-
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.
-
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Political satire is a serious thing. In democratic newspapers throughout the world there are daily cartoons that often are not even funny, as is the case especially in many English-language newspapers. Instead, they contain a political message, and the artist takes full responsibility.
-
Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.
-
The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.
-
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
-
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.
-
The hand of God creates; it does not conceal.
-
If people buy my books for vanity, I consider it a tax on idiocy.
-
'There, Master Niketas,' Baudolino said, 'when I was not prey to the temptations of this world, I devoted my nights to imagining other worlds. ... There is nothing better than imagining other worlds,' he said, 'to forget the painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn't yet realized that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one.'
-
As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
-
Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
-
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.
-
Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.
-
I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper.
-
I started to write The Name of the Rose in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk.