Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco OMRIwas an Italian novelist, literary critic, philosopher, semiotician and university professor. He is best known internationally for his 1980 historical mystery novel Il nome della rosa, an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, with biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory. He later wrote other novels, including Il pendolo di Foucaultand L'isola del giorno prima. His novel Il cimitero di Praga, released in 2010, was a best-seller...
NationalityItalian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth5 January 1932
CountryItaly
I consider always the adult life to be the continuous retrieval of childhood.
My poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne.
There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.
A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection - not an invitation for hypnosis.
In other words, although I don't like them, we do need noble-spirited souls.
A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.
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.
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.
On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German Monk toward the end of the fourteenth century...First of all, what style should I employ?
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.
Young people do not watch television; they are on the Internet.
Many people who no longer go to church end up falling prey to superstition.
There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism.
Berlusconi is a genius in communication. Otherwise, he would never have become so rich.