Umberto Eco Quotes
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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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A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
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Human beings are religious animals.
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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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In the United States, politics is a profession, whereas in Europe it is a right and a duty.
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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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Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.
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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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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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I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.
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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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A secret is powerful when it is empty.
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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.
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The hand of God creates; it does not conceal.
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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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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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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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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.
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The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?
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The mobile phone... is a tool for those whose professions require a fast response, such as doctors or plumbers.
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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.