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A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

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
Would
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Interpretation
Machine
Otherwise
Machines
Narrator
Novel
Narrators
Written
Generating
Work
Interpretations

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A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.
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When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.
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I write what I write.
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Mystical additions and subtractions always come out the way you want.
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He who falls in love in bars doesn't need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.
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Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.
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I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.
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It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.
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But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh.
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When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.
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I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
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The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts therefore it is dumb.
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The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.
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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.
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I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
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On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German Monk toward the end of the fourteenth century...First of all, what style should I employ?
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A library's ideal function is to be a little bit like a bouquiniste's stall, a place for trouvailles.
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A human best, which is very little. Its hard to accept the idea that there cannot be an order in the universe because it would offend the free will of God and His omnipotence. So the freedom of God is our condemnation, or at least the condemnation of our pride.
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The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power.
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