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I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.

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
Rather
Poets
Certain
Quickly
Good
Later
Thankfully
Think
Gave
Masturbation
Thinking
Early
Sixteen
Life
Poet
Publish
Like
Poetry
Fifteen
Age
Burn

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There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.
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I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.
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A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.
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My collection of rare books concerns only books that don't tell the truth.
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Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.
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It is obvious that the newspaper produces the opinion of the readers.
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A newspaper can follow the compulsions, the desires of the readers. Take the English evening newspapers - they are following the readers' desires when they are interested only in the royal family gossip. But even the most objective, serious newspaper in the world designs the way in which the reader could or should think. That's unavoidable.
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One of the problems I have always discussed is the refusal to distinguish between comment and fact. The newspaper wraps every fact into a comment. It is impossible to give mere fact without establishing point of view.
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The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.
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Listening doesn't mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don't know you know.
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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.
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Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used to tell at all.
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Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.
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We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.
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I seal that which was not to be said in the tomb that I become.
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Where else? I belong to a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others who are lost and lonely.
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A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.
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A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.
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Mystical additions and subtractions always come out the way you want.
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