"My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer."
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Quote collection
Umberto Eco quotes (page 14 of 19)
368 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Libraries can take the place of God."
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"It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion."
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"...we can only add to the world, where we believe it ends, more parts similar to those we already know (an expanse made again and always of water and land, stars and skies)."
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"The followers must feel besieged."
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"Today I realize that many recent exercises in "deconstructive reading" read as if inspired by my parody. This is parody's mission: it must never be afraid of going too far. If its aim is true, it simply heralds what others will later produce, unblushing, with impassive and assertive gravity."
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"We invented the car, and it made it easier for us to crash and die. If I gave a car to my grandfather, he would die in five minutes, while I have grown up slowly to accept speed."
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"Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind of secret set of rules that they would like to see revealed. There is no set of rules, or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules."
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"I am a professor who writes novels on Sundays"
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"Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges."
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"The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity."
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"... luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene."
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"I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell a story."
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"You cannot escape one infinite, I told myself, by fleeing to another. You cannot escape the revelation of the identical by taking refuge in the illusion of the multiple."
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"Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned."
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"Homer's work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that."
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"I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper."
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"[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits."
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"It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things."
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"I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels."
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