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Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.
Umberto Eco -
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.
Umberto Eco
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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.
Umberto Eco -
The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
Umberto Eco -
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.
Umberto Eco -
I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.
Umberto Eco -
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.
Umberto Eco -
I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.
Umberto Eco
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Translation is the art of failure.
Umberto Eco -
Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis.
Umberto Eco -
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.
Umberto Eco -
I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.
Umberto Eco -
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.
Umberto Eco -
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.
Umberto Eco
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I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources -- Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake.
Umberto Eco -
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.
Umberto Eco -
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.
Umberto Eco -
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.
Umberto Eco -
I don't miss my youth. I'm glad I had one, but I wouldn't like to start over.
Umberto Eco -
The grandeur of Jerusalem is also... its problem.
Umberto Eco
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When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.
Umberto Eco -
Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.
Umberto Eco -
You can be obsessed by remorse all your life, not because you chose the wrong thing- you can always repent, atone : but because you never had the chance to prove to yourself that you would have chosen the right thing.
Umberto Eco -
It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.
Umberto Eco