Quotes By Umberto Eco

My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.

In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.

Translation is the art of failure.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

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.

I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.

We like lists because we don't want to die.

There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.

When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.

How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see.

I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.

After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs.

Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.

But now 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.

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.

From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.

I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience.

Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

The most interesting letters I received about 'The Name of the Rose' were from people in the Midwest that maybe didn't understand exactly, but wanted to understand more and who were excited by this picture of a world which was not their own.

What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.

A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.

I write what I write.

People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.

It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.

Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame.

Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.