"The mobile phone... is a tool for those whose professions require a fast response, such as doctors or plumbers."
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Quote collection
Umberto Eco quotes (page 11 of 19)
368 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The art of splitting hairs four ways. This is the department of useless techniques. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, for example, is how to build machines for greeting uncles. We're not sure, though, if Pylocatabasis belongs, since it's the art of being saved by a hair. Somehow that doesn't seem completely useless."
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"A writer writes for writers, a non-writer writes for his next-door neighbor or for the manager of the local bank branch, and he fears (often mistakenly) that they would not understand or, in any case, would not forgive his boldness."
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"Authors frequently say things they are unaware of; only after they have gotten the reactions of their readers do they discover what they have said"
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"Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told."
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"The more elusive and ambiguous a symbol is, the more it gains significance and power."
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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 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."
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"Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the creator is revealed."
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"Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time."
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"I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she's always dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species."
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"Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names."
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"Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world."
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"I was in a maze. No matter which way I turned, it was the wrong way."
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"Socrates ... did not write. It seems academically obvious that he perished because he did not publish!"
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"Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another."
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"There are two kinds of friendship: one is genuine affection, the other is inability to refuse."
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"Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious."
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"Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian."
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"One of the problems I have always discussed is the refusal to distinguish between comment and fact. The newspaper wraps every fact into a comment. It is impossible to give mere fact without establishing point of view."
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"Conspiracies and all the theories of conspiracy are a part of the canon of fakes. And I'm involved, in all of my writings, the theoretical ones as well as the novels, with the production of fakes."
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