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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
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Words
Instance
Stories
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Firsts
Role
Cosmological
Nothing
Choose
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Puts

More quotes by Umberto Eco

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We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.
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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.
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My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.
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The comic is the perception of the opposite humor is the feeling of it.
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Libraries have always been humanities' way of preserving its collective wisdom
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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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What is love? There is nothing in the world, neither man nor Devil nor any thing, that I hold as suspect as love, for it penetrates the soul more than any other thing. Nothing exists that so fills and binds the heart as love does. Therefore, unless you have those weapons that subdue it, the soul plunges through love into an immense abyss.
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We know that sensory phenomena are transcribed in the photographic emulsion in such a way that even if there is a causal link with the real phenomena, the graphic images can be considered as wholly arbitrary with respect to these phenomena.
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The Art of the Romance, though warning us that it is providing fictions, opens a door into the Palace of Absurdity, and when we have lightly stepped inside, slams it shut behind us.
Umberto Eco
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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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All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.
Umberto Eco
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But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh.
Umberto Eco
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Conspiracies and all the theories of conspiracy are a part of the canon of fakes. And I'm involved, in all of my writings, the theoretical ones as well as the novels, with the production of fakes.
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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.
Umberto Eco
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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
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I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.
Umberto Eco
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A secret is powerful when it is empty. People often mention the Masonic secret. What on earth is the Masonic secret? No one can tell. As long as it remains empty it can be filled up with every possible notion, and it has power.
Umberto Eco
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The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn't always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea.
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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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A library's ideal function is to be a little bit like a bouquiniste's stall, a place for trouvailles.
Umberto Eco