Umberto Eco Quotes
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I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.
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Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.
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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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Listening doesn't mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don't know you know.
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I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel.
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I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.
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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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When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.
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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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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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The grandeur of Jerusalem is also... its problem.
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Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis.
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I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.
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It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.
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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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We like lists because we don't want to die.
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The most interesting letters I received about 'The Name of the Rose' were from people in the Midwest that maybe didn't understand exactly, but wanted to understand more and who were excited by this picture of a world which was not their own.
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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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Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.
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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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Ugliness is more inventive than beauty. Beauty always follows certain camps. I think it's more amusing - ugliness - than beauty.
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Translation is the art of failure.
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It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.