Umberto Eco Quotes
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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 like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.
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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.
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It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.
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One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
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I don't miss my youth. I'm glad I had one, but I wouldn't like to start over.
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Libraries can take the place of God.
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People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.
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A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
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There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism.
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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.
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Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis. The most exciting letters I received were from people in places like that.
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My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn't visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.
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The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar 'queen,' alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.
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Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.
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Certainly, light fiction exists and encompasses mysteries or second-class romance novels, books that are read on the beach, whose only aim is to entertain. These books are not concerned with style or creativity - instead they are successful because they are repetitive and follow a template that readers enjoy.
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Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.
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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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Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.
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Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.
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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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You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. when you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.
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A sign is not only something which stands for something else; it is also something that can and must be interpreted. The criterion of interpretability allows us to start from a given sign to cover, step by step, the whole universe of semiosis.
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Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.