Umberto Eco Quotes
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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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Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.
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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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"Then we are living in a place abandoned by God," I said, disheartened. "Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?" William asked me, looking down from his great height.
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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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I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.
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I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.
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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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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 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 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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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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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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Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis.
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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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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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I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don't tell anybody what I'm doing. I'm living in my private world. And it's a great sensation.
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The grandeur of Jerusalem is also... its problem.
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Translation is the art of failure.
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A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appears to be funny.
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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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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.