Quotes By Umberto Eco

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

I write what I write.

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.

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

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

Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.

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

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

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

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.

In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.