Umberto Eco Quotes
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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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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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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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The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.
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I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.
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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 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 have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.
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Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis.
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When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.
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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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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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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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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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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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I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.
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Translation is the art of failure.
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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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We like lists because we don't want to die.
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Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.
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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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People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.
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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.