Umberto Eco Quotes

• I write what I write.

  Umberto Eco

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Write

• I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience.

  Umberto Eco

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Think, Professor

• 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.

  Umberto Eco

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People

• I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.

  Umberto Eco

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Passion

• How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn’t have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see.

  Umberto Eco

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Feel

• From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.

  Umberto Eco

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Lies

• Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.

  Umberto Eco

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Time, Birth

• Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis. The most exciting letters I received were from people in places like that.

  Umberto Eco

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Every, Goes

• Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.

  Umberto Eco

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Creativity

• But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don’t. Don’t evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.

  Umberto Eco

  Topics in Country

  Tags in Intellectual

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

  Umberto Eco

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Books

• As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.

  Umberto Eco

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Philosophy

• After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs.

  Umberto Eco

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Practice

• But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

  Umberto Eco

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Believe

• When men stop believing in God, it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

  Umberto Eco

  Topics in God

  Tags in Stop, Men

• Translation is the art of failure.

  Umberto Eco

  Topics in Art, Failure

  Tags in Translation

• There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.

  Umberto Eco

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Anticipation, Sport, Direction, Flying, Bullet

• The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

  Umberto Eco

  Topics in Dream

  Tags in Coward

• The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

  Umberto Eco

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Dumb, Lies, Reading, Book

• The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.

  Umberto Eco

  Topics in Humor

  Tags in Perception, Opposite

Umberto Eco (49)

Birth:	5th January, 1932
Nationality:	Italian
Profession:	Essayist, Novelist, Philosopher

About

Umberto Eco Knight Grand Cross is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist. He is best known for his groundbreaking 1980 novel Il nome della rosa, an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory.

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