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The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

Umberto Eco

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Umberto Eco
Age: 84 †
Born: 1932
Born: January 5
Died: 2016
Died: February 19
Essayist
Historian
Literary Critic
Literary Scholar
Medievalist
Novelist
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Screenwriter
Semiotician
Translator
Lissändria
Umberto Ecco
Umberto Eccounstino
Humberto Eco
Dedalus
Umberto Eko
Oumperto Eko
Eco Umberto
U. Eco
Interpret
Author
Wrote
Tell
May
Book
Must

More quotes by Umberto Eco

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There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.
Umberto Eco
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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.
Umberto Eco
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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
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All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.
Umberto Eco
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The faith a movement proclaims doesn't count: what counts is the hope it offers. All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this: to keep the leper as he is.
Umberto Eco
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We invented the car, and it made it easier for us to crash and die. If I gave a car to my grandfather, he would die in five minutes, while I have grown up slowly to accept speed.
Umberto Eco
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If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity.
Umberto Eco
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The Art of the Romance, though warning us that it is providing fictions, opens a door into the Palace of Absurdity, and when we have lightly stepped inside, slams it shut behind us.
Umberto Eco
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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
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There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries.
Umberto Eco
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To survive, you must tell stories.
Umberto Eco
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Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.
Umberto Eco
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Your masters at Oxford have taught you to idolize reason, drying up the prophetic capacities of your heart!
Umberto Eco
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Contemporary societies have lost the sense of the feast but have kept the obscure drive for it.
Umberto Eco
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They say that a cat, if it falls from a window and hits its nose, can lose its sense of smell and then, because cats live by their ability to smell, it can no longer recognize things. I'm a cat that hit its nose.
Umberto Eco
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We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.
Umberto Eco
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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
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There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past. As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.
Umberto Eco
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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
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...we can only add to the world, where we believe it ends, more parts similar to those we already know (an expanse made again and always of water and land, stars and skies).
Umberto Eco