At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories. — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person. — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to… — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize… — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of… — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and… — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World… — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological… — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened… — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are… — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those men who can find it even when others fail to… — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories… — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening,… — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early… — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned. — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
“This has nothing to do with realism (even if it explains also realism). A completely real world can be constructed, in which asses fly… — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
“…there’s nothing in this world that demands more caution than the truth. To tell the truth is like leeching one’s own heart...” — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is… — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
“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… — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the USA and China. — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
The Fundamental Principle that governs - or ought to govern -human affairs if we wish to avoid misunderstandings, conflicts, or pointless utopias, is negotiation. — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100 degrees centigrade in plastic thermos cups, usually obligatory in railroad stations… — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
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… — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
They say that a cat, if it falls from a window and hits its nose, can lose its sense of smell and then, because… — Umberto Eco Copy Share Image
