Umberto Eco Quotes
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You’ll come back To me . . . It’s written in the stars, you see, you’ll come back. You’ll come back, it’s a fact that I am strong because I do believe in you.
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To read a paper book is another experience: you can do it on a ship, on the branch of a tree, on your bed, even if there is a blackout.
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When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.
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The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.
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Our most noted satirists are true columnists, and their opinions can be worth more than any well-documented expose.
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I write what I write.
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'A sack,' Baudolino explained, like a man who knows a trade well, 'is like a grape harvest: you have to divide the tasks. There are those who press the grapes, those who carry off the must in the tuns, those who cook for others, others who go to fetch the good wine from last year.... a sack is a serious job,'
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In the United States, politics is a profession, whereas in Europe it is a right and a duty.
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The more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn't matter if the things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.
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If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.
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... luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.
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When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
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National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.
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It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.
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As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.
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Nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn.
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I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.
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Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.
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New Orleans is not in the grip of a neurosis of a denied past; it passes out memories generously like a great lord; it doesn't have to pursue "the real thing."
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Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards; those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and those bastards always talk about the purity of race.
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A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.
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I have a good memory. But I would be interested in memory even if I had a bad memory, because I believe that memory is our soul. If we lose our memory completely, we are without a soul.
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Not that the incredulous person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't believe in everything.
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I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of.