Quotes By Umberto Eco

What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.

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.

Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.

Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis. The most exciting letters I received were from people in places like that.

There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.

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.

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.

But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.

As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.

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

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

I write what I write.

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.

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

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.

The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.

Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.

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.