Writing Quotes by Umberto Eco

“From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola”

— Umberto Eco

I write what I write.

— Umberto Eco

I am a professor who writes novels on Sundays

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

— Umberto Eco

Writing doesn't mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.

— Umberto Eco

[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are…

— Umberto Eco

“What model reader did I want as i was writing? An accomplice, to be sure, one who would play my game.”

— Umberto Eco

Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and…

— Umberto Eco

The thought that all experience will be lost at the moment of my death makes me feel pain and fear... What a…

— Umberto Eco

I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one.…

— Umberto Eco

I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point…

— Umberto Eco

A writer writes for writers, a non-writer writes for his next-door neighbor or for the manager of the local bank branch, and…

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

“But this lump does not absolve me, because I got it through heedlessness, not though courage. I run my tongue over my…

— Umberto Eco

There must be a connection between the lust for power and impotentia coeundi. I liked Marx, I was sure that he and…

— Umberto Eco

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

— Umberto Eco

“[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so…

— Umberto Eco

“You cannot change the world with ideas. People with few ideas are less likely to make mistakes; they follow what everyone else…

— Umberto Eco

Given that there are seven billion people living on this earth, there is a consistent quantity of imbecile or idiot, okay. Previously,…

— Umberto Eco

“I transcribe my text with no concern for timeliness. In the years when I discovered the Abbé Vallet volume, there was a…

— Umberto Eco

If you want to become a man of letters and perhaps write some Histories one day, you must also lie and invent…

— Umberto Eco

“It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there…

— Umberto Eco

I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.

— Umberto Eco

I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don't tell anybody what I'm doing. I'm living in…

— Umberto Eco

When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did…

— Umberto Eco

The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.

— Umberto Eco

I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison…

— Umberto Eco

Socrates ... did not write. It seems academically obvious that he perished because he did not publish!

— Umberto Eco

An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original.

— Umberto Eco

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to…

— Umberto Eco

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that…

— Umberto Eco