Quotes By Umberto Eco

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.

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.

Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.

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.

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.