Umberto Eco Quotes

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Umberto Eco

Profession : Novelist

Birth : January 5, 1932

If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.

Umberto Eco

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

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

Political satire is a serious thing. In democratic newspapers throughout the world there are daily cartoons that often are not even funny, as is the case especially in many English-language newspapers. Instead, they contain a political message, and the artist takes full responsibility.

Umberto Eco

Our most noted satirists are true columnists, and their opinions can be worth more than any well-documented expose.

Umberto Eco

One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.

Umberto Eco

I was a fervent Catholic, and I belonged to the national organizations, even becoming one of the national leaders, until the age of 21, 22.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven't read, that we haven't had the time to read.

Umberto Eco

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

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

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

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

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

Umberto Eco