Umberto Eco

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.

What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action.

What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.

There are books on our shelves we haven't read and doubtless never will, that each of us has probably put to one side in the belief that we will read them later on, perhaps even in another life.

Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.

The pleasures of love are pains that become desirable, where sweetness and torment blend, and so love is voluntary insanity, infernal paradise, and celestial hell -- in short, harmony of opposite yearnings, sorrowful laughter, soft diamond.

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

The grandeur of Jerusalem is also... its problem.

But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.

With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the U.S.A. and China.

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.

Conspiracies do exist. Probably in this moment in New York there is an economic group making a conspiracy in order to buy three banks. But if they succeed, they are immediately discovered.

The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.

There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.

Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respiration - acquire the pace. Otherwise you stop right away.

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.

A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.

Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.

When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.

After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs.

You die, but most of what you have accumulated will not be lost; you are leaving a message in a bottle.

The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear... What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away... We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

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.

As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.

I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.

I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.

How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see.

A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.

History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.

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.

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.

Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.

It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.

Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.

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.

Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.

My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.

I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.

Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.

Every great thinker is someone else's moron.

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments when they arent trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

When men stop believing in God it isnt that they then believe in nothing they believe in everything.

Today, political events are nullified unless they're on TV.

The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon... The book has been thoroughly tested, and it's very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes.

In the Middle Ages, cathedrals 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.

The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.

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.

Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.

The real hero is always a hero by mistake he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.

Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.

My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.

We are never racist against somebody who is very far away. I don't know any racism against the Eskimos. To have a racist feeling, there must be an other who is slightly different from us - but is living close to us.

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

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.

Berlusconi is a genius in communication. Otherwise, he would never have become so rich.

Nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn.

Libraries can take the place of God.

One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.

I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.

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.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis.

I was in a maze. No matter which way I turned, it was the wrong way.

Translation is the art of failure.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.

There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism.

We are a pluralist civilisation because we allow mosques to be built in our countries, and we are not going to stop simply because Christian missionaries are thrown into prison in Kabul. If we did so, we, too, would become Taliban.

Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.

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.

Our life is full of empty space.

Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.

The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.

It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.

We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

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.

From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.

If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach them how to use television.

Beauty is boring because it is predictable.

Sometimes you say things with a smile with the precise intention of making it clear that you are not being serious, and are only kidding. If I salute a friend with a smile and say, 'How are you, you old scoundrel!' clearly I don't really mean he's a scoundrel.

The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?

We invented the car, and it made it easier for us to crash and die. If I gave a car to my grandfather, he would die in five minutes, while I have grown up slowly to accept speed.

We like lists because we don't want to die.

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.

Many people who no longer go to church end up falling prey to superstition.

I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper.

When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.

I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.

It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with one's own roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad.

People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

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.

I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.

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.

If people buy my books for vanity, I consider it a tax on idiocy.