Umberto Eco Quotes
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All the blogs, Facebook, Twitter are made by people who want to show their own private affairs at the price of making fakes, to try to appear such as they are not, to construct another personality, which is a veritable loss of identity.
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This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.
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But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.
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One of the problems I have always discussed is the refusal to distinguish between comment and fact. The newspaper wraps every fact into a comment. It is impossible to give mere fact without establishing point of view.
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Is it worth it to be born if you cannot remember it later? And, technically speaking, had I ever been born? Other people, of course, said that I was. As far as I know, I was born in late April, at sixty years of age, in a hospital room.
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A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.
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Originality and creativity are nothing but the result of the wise management of combinations. The creative genius combines more rapidly, and with a greater critical sense of what gets tossed out and what gets saved, the same material that the failed genius has to work with.
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Is it possible to say "It was a beautiful morning at the end of November" without feeling like Snoopy?
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A writer writes for writers, a non-writer writes for his next-door neighbor or for the manager of the local bank branch, and he fears (often mistakenly) that they would not understand or, in any case, would not forgive his boldness.
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If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity.
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It takes a little time, but the pleasures of cooking begin before the pleasures of the palate, and preparing means anticipating.
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Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the creator is revealed.
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The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad.
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It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.
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Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.
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Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.
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Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners to the mass media.
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Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country
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He had prepared his death much earlier, in his imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was planning the reality of that death.
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But why doesn't the Gospel ever say that Christ laughed?" I asked, for no good reason. "Is Jorge right?" "Legions of scholars have wondered whether Christ laughed. The question doesn't interest me much. I believe he never laughed, because, omniscient as the son of God had to be, he knew how we Christians would behave. . . .
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In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.
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[I am fascinated by stupidity] because normal intelligence is boring. Two plus two makes four - finished. You have no possibilities! Stupidity is infinite. Two plus two can make billions of different numbers.
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I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.
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There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.