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Books Quotes by Umberto Eco

86 Books quotes by Umberto Eco

All Books quotes Umberto Eco’s page

A book is like a spoon, a tool that cannot be improved, reminding us that its value comes from use. Eco says the good of a book lies in being read, and that a narrator should not supply interpretations. He also points out that there are more books than hours to read them.

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Books always speak of other books.

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We live for books.

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“The book is like the wheel - once invented, it cannot be bettered.”

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Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.

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I am a professor who writes novels on Sundays

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“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to enquiry”

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It is obvious that the newspaper produces the opinion of the readers.

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A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

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

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Books are menaced by books. Any excess of information produces silence.

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“the book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. once invented, it cannot be improved”

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We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.

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Naturally, everything depends on one's background books and on what one is looking for.

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“recognize the evidence through which the world speaks to us like a great book...”

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

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To read a paper book is another experience: you can do it on a ship, on the branch of a tree, on…

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If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.

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“someone has mixed and shuffled the words of the Book more than was right.”

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I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological…

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A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the…

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“At the end of my patient reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished…

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The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs,…

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Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves…

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Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because…

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There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past. As…

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A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what…

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“All the same,” I said, “when you read the prints in the snow and the evidence of the branches, you did not…

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To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening,…

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“Ok now--I don't read "all the time." Remember, that these ratings are over quite a while. I'll try to put in some…

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Certainly, light fiction exists and encompasses mysteries or second-class romance novels, books that are read on the beach, whose only aim is…

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“There, I said to myself, are the reasons for the silence and darkness that surround the library: it is the preserve of…

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“Dostoevsky was writing about losers. The main character of The Iliad, Hector, is a loser. It’s very boring to talk about winners.…

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A newspaper can follow the compulsions, the desires of the readers. Take the English evening newspapers - they are following the readers'…

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“There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past ("en…

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The good of a book lies in its being read.

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I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.

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I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

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

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I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not…

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

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More by Umberto Eco

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early…

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

“This has nothing to do with realism (even if it explains also realism). A completely real world can be constructed, in which asses fly…

“…there’s nothing in this world that demands more caution than the truth. To tell the truth is like leeching one’s own heart...”

The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is…

“No algorithm exists for the metaphor, nor can a metaphor be produced by means of a computer’s precise instructions, no matter what the volume…

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

The Fundamental Principle that governs - or ought to govern -human affairs if we wish to avoid misunderstandings, conflicts, or pointless utopias, is negotiation.

Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.

American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100 degrees centigrade in plastic thermos cups, usually obligatory in railroad stations…

Listening doesn't mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don't…

They say that a cat, if it falls from a window and hits its nose, can lose its sense of smell and then, because…

There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past. As I learned…

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.