Top 70 Umberto Eco Quotes

I like nicotine because it excites my brain and helps me work.

I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare’s tragedies.

Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.

Homer’s work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that.

I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.

When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.

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

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

Sometimes you say things with a smile with the precise intention of making it clear that you are not being serious, and are only kidding. If I salute a friend with a smile and say, ‘How are you, you old scoundrel!’ clearly I don’t really mean he’s a scoundrel.

What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.

The grandeur of Jerusalem is also… its problem.

I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.

To play the trumpet, you must train your lips for a long time. When I was twelve or thirteen I was a good player, but I lost the skill and now I play very badly. I do it every day even so. The reason is that I want to return to my childhood. For me, the trumpet is evidence of the sort of young man I was.

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.

The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.

Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.

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

The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.

One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.

With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the U.S.A. and China.

When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.

Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus’ psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.

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

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.

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.

Narrativity presumes a special taste for plot. And this taste for plot was always very present in the Anglo-Saxon countries and that explains their high quality of detective novels.

I have to admit that I only read ‘War and Peace’ when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.

Translation is the art of failure.

The mobile phone… is a tool for those whose professions require a fast response, such as doctors or plumbers.

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

A secret is powerful when it is empty.

Conspiracies do exist. Probably in this moment in New York there is an economic group making a conspiracy in order to buy three banks. But if they succeed, they are immediately discovered.

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.

Beauty is boring because it is predictable.

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

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

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.

The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar ‘queen,’ alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.

Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages… all forms of communication – visual, tactile, and so on… There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.

It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.

Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis.

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

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.

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

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.

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.

It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.

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.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

To read a paper book is another experience: you can do it on a ship, on the branch of a tree, on your bed, even if there is a blackout.

Libraries can take the place of God.

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.

The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.

I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.

I don’t want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don’t fall into the trap of starting a new novel.

Political satire is a serious thing. In democratic newspapers throughout the world there are daily cartoons that often are not even funny, as is the case especially in many English-language newspapers. Instead, they contain a political message, and the artist takes full responsibility.

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

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.

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

I was a fervent Catholic, and I belonged to the national organizations, even becoming one of the national leaders, until the age of 21, 22.

My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn’t visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.

Our life is full of empty space.

If people buy my books for vanity, I consider it a tax on idiocy.

Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.

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.

The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear… What a waste, decades spent building up experience, only to throw it all away… We remedy this sadness by working. For example, by writing, painting, or building cities.

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper.

The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.

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.