Umberto Eco Quotes
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I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
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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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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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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 great problem of the internet is how to filter information, how to discard what is not relevant or what is silly and to keep only the important information.
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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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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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Is it possible to say "It was a beautiful morning at the end of November" without feeling like Snoopy?
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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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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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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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For Mallarmé naming an object meant suppressing three-quarters of its poetic pleasure (which consists in the joy of guessing bit by bit - "le suggérer, voilà le rêve!").
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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.
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The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.
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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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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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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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There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.
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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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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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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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I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed.
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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.