Quote

Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.

Umberto Eco

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Two
Walking
Care
Novel
Take
Takes
Children
Least
Writing
Child
Starts
Every
Lasts
Speaking
Years
Last
Convinced
Time
Write
Birth

More quotes by Umberto Eco

Image
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.
Umberto Eco
Image
The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.
Umberto Eco
Image
A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.
Umberto Eco
Image
History is a blood-drenched enigma and the world an error.
Umberto Eco
Image
All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.
Umberto Eco
Image
It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house.
Umberto Eco
Image
I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.
Umberto Eco
Image
When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.
Umberto Eco
Image
What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action.
Umberto Eco
Image
He who falls in love in bars doesn't need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.
Umberto Eco
Image
I felt no passion, no jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as emotionless as an aluminum pot.
Umberto Eco
Image
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
Image
That is a real attitude - to see everything as being meaningful, even the less important things, to prove something, even the greater problems of life.
Umberto Eco
Image
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
Image
All the blogs, Facebook, Twitter are made by people who want to show their own private affairs at the price of making fakes, to try to appear such as they are not, to construct another personality, which is a veritable loss of identity.
Umberto Eco
Image
The Roseicrucians were everywhere, aided by the fact that they didn't exist.
Umberto Eco
Image
For many years I have devoted articles and essays to newspapers, from the inside. So criticism of the newspapers was a topic that I practiced for a long time.
Umberto Eco
Image
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.
Umberto Eco
Image
My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.
Umberto Eco
Image
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