Umberto Eco Quotes
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It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.
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There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven't read, that we haven't had the time to read.
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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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Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.
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I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare's tragedies.
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I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.
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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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Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.
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Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he was finding India but discovered America. History is full of events that happened because of an imaginary tale.
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I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.
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I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she's always dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species.
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Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.
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Authors frequently say things they are unaware of; only after they have gotten the reactions of their readers do they discover what they have said
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When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.
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Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis.
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Translation is the art of failure.
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There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past. As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.
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Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.
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The grandeur of Jerusalem is also... its problem.
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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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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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When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.
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I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.
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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.