Quote

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

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
Ideas
March
Wanted
Rose
Writing
Moved
Started
Name
Names
Seminal
Idea
Monk
Write
Poison

More quotes by Umberto Eco

Image
I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of.
Umberto Eco
Image
[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
Image
I don't know, maybe we're always looking for the right place, maybe it's within reach, but we don't recognize it. Maybe to recognize it, we have to believe in it.
Umberto Eco
Image
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
Image
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
Umberto Eco
Image
Hypotyposis is the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene.
Umberto Eco
Image
Then why do you want to know? Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do.
Umberto Eco
Image
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.
Umberto Eco
Image
We invented the car, and it made it easier for us to crash and die. If I gave a car to my grandfather, he would die in five minutes, while I have grown up slowly to accept speed.
Umberto Eco
Image
I am an old consumer of papers. I cannot avoid reading my newspapers every morning.
Umberto Eco
Image
Our most noted satirists are true columnists and their opinions can be worth more than any well-documented exposé.
Umberto Eco
Image
It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with one's own roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad.
Umberto Eco
Image
Mystical additions and subtractions always come out the way you want.
Umberto Eco
Image
libraries are fascinating places: sometimes you feel you are under the canopy of a railway station, and when you read books about exotic places there's a feeling of travelling to distant lands
Umberto Eco
Image
The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.
Umberto Eco
Image
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.
Umberto Eco
Image
Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he was finding India but discovered America. History is full of events that happened because of an imaginary tale.
Umberto Eco
Image
Is it possible to say It was a beautiful morning at the end of November without feeling like Snoopy?
Umberto Eco
Image
Ugliness is more inventive than beauty. Beauty always follows certain camps. I think it's more amusing - ugliness - than beauty.
Umberto Eco
Image
The Roseicrucians were everywhere, aided by the fact that they didn't exist.
Umberto Eco