Quotes By Umberto Eco

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Translation is the art of failure.

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.

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

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

There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.

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.

Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.