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There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

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
Thing
Shopping
List
Lists
Write
Writing

More quotes by 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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the first quality of an honest man is contempt for religion, which would have us afraid of the most natural thing in the world, which is death and would have us hate the one beautiful thing destiny has given us, which is life.
Umberto Eco
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We live for books.
Umberto Eco
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Conspiracies do exist. Probably in this moment in New York there is an economic group making a conspiracy in order to buy three banks. But if they succeed, they are immediately discovered.
Umberto Eco
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True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.
Umberto Eco
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National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.
Umberto Eco
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The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.
Umberto Eco
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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?
Umberto Eco
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For such is the fate of parody: it must never fear exaggerating. If it strikes home, it will only prefigure something that others will then do without a smile--and without a blush--in steadfast virile seriousness.
Umberto Eco
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I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.
Umberto Eco
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We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.
Umberto Eco
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Whoever reflects on four things I would be better if he were never born: that which is above, that which is below, that which is before, that which is after.
Umberto Eco
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[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits.
Umberto Eco
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For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.
Umberto Eco
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You’ll come back To me . . . It’s written in the stars, you see, you’ll come back. You’ll come back, it’s a fact that I am strong because I do believe in you.
Umberto Eco
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I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story.
Umberto Eco
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Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.
Umberto Eco
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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
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I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk.
Umberto Eco
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When we traded the results of our fantasies, it seemed to us-and rightly-that we had proceeded by unwarranted associations, by shortcuts so extraordinary that, if anyone had accused us of really believing them, we would have been ashamed.
Umberto Eco