Umberto Eco Quotes

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Umberto Eco

Profession : Novelist

Birth : January 5, 1932

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

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

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

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

I write what I write.

Umberto Eco

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

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

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

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

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

Umberto Eco

Our life is full of empty space.

Umberto Eco