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

More quotes by Umberto Eco

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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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We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.
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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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You can be obsessed by remorse all your life, not because you chose the wrong thing- you can always repent, atone : but because you never had the chance to prove to yourself that you would have chosen the right thing.
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Is it possible to say It was a beautiful morning at the end of November without feeling like Snoopy?
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Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.
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You cannot believe what you are saying. Well, no. Hardly ever. But the philosopher is like the poet. The latter composes ideal letters for an ideal nymph, only to plumb with his words the depths of passion. The philosopher tests the coldness of his gaze, to see how far he can undermine the fortress of bigotry.
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He who laughs does not believe in what he laughs at, but neither does he hate it. Therefore, laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is self-propagating.
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They [the Templars] had read Avicenna, and they were not ignorant, like the Europeans. How could you live alongside a tolerant, mystical, libertine culture for two centuries without succumbing to its allure, particularly when you compared it to Western culture, which was crude, vulgar, barbaric, and Germanic?
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I was the type who looked at discussions of What Is Truth only with a view toward correcting the manuscript. If you were to quote I am that I am, for example, I thought that the fundamental problem was where to put the comma, inside the quotation marks or outside.
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One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
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The good of a book lies in its being read.
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Ugliness is more inventive than beauty. Beauty always follows certain camps. I think it's more amusing - ugliness - than beauty.
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I love the smell of book ink in the morning.
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I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
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If culture did not filter, it would be inane - as inane as the formless, boundless Internet is on its own. And if we all possessed the boundless knowledge of the Web, we would be idiots! Culture is an instrument for making a hierarchical system of intellectual labor.
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Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.
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Simple mechanisms do not love.
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All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful.
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Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respiration - acquire the pace. Otherwise you stop right away.
Umberto Eco