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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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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Our life is full of empty space.
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Human beings are religious animals.
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Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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 hand of God creates; it does not conceal.
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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.
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If people buy my books for vanity, I consider it a tax on idiocy.
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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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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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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.
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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 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.