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've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources -- Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake.
Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...
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.
When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.
When you are on the dancefloor, there is nothing to do but dance.
That is a real attitude - to see everything as being meaningful, even the less important things, to prove something, even the greater problems of life.
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards; those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and those bastards always talk about the purity of race.
Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.
It is obvious that the newspaper produces the opinion of the readers.
I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).
I have lost the freedom of not having an opinion.
The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.
Libraries have always been humanities' way of preserving its collective wisdom