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I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).

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
Nothing
Choose
Allen
Matter
Novel
Woody
First
Roles
Genesis
Writing
Told
Puts
Like
Story
Discovered
Words
Instance
Stories
Models
Firsts
Role
Cosmological

More quotes by Umberto Eco

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We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.
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I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed.
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Being a professional philosopher is, I would say, feeling natural to think about small and great problems. It is the only pleasure.
Umberto Eco
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I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.
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Once upon a time there were mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners to the mass media.
Umberto Eco
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The followers must feel besieged.
Umberto Eco
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It is obvious that the newspaper produces the opinion of the readers.
Umberto Eco
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Libraries can take the place of God.
Umberto Eco
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It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.
Umberto Eco
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You don't fall in love because you fall in love you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. when you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first thing you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.
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Thus we have on stage two men, each of whom knows nothing of what he believes the other knows, and to deceive each other reciprocally both speak in allusions, each of the two hoping (in vain) that the other holds the key to his puzzle.
Umberto Eco
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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
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We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.
Umberto Eco
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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
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The more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn't matter if the things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.
Umberto Eco
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Originality and creativity are nothing but the result of the wise management of combinations. The creative genius combines more rapidly, and with a greater critical sense of what gets tossed out and what gets saved, the same material that the failed genius has to work with.
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My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.
Umberto Eco
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I felt like poisoning a monk.
Umberto Eco
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The photograph [of Che Guevara], for a civilization now accustomed to thinking in images, was not the description of a single event... it was an argument.
Umberto Eco
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... luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.
Umberto Eco