"And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?"
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Quote collection
Umberto Eco quotes (page 18 of 19)
368 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the USA and China."
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"In the United States, politics is a profession, whereas in Europe it is a right and a duty ."
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"I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk."
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"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."
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"I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: "But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primogenial chaos? Isn't affirming God's absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?"
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"I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel."
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"When we traded the results of our fantasies, it seemed to us-and rightly-that we had proceeded by unwarranted associations, by shortcuts so extraordinary that, if anyone had accused us of really believing them, we would have been ashamed."
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"Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state."
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"Certainly, light fiction exists and encompasses mysteries or second-class romance novels, books that are read on the beach, whose only aim is to entertain. These books are not concerned with style or creativity - instead they are successful because they are repetitive and follow a template that readers enjoy."
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"He who falls in love in bars doesn't need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan."
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"A newspaper can follow the compulsions, the desires of the readers. Take the English evening newspapers - they are following the readers' desires when they are interested only in the royal family gossip. But even the most objective, serious newspaper in the world designs the way in which the reader could or should think. That's unavoidable."
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"My collection of rare books concerns only books that don't tell the truth."
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"I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person."
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"I'm always fascinated by losers. Also, in my "Foucault's Pendulum," the main characters, who are in a way losers, they are more interesting than the winners."
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"Being a professional philosopher is, I would say, feeling natural to think about small and great problems. It is the only pleasure."
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"I am not on Facebook and on Twitter because the purpose of my life is to avoid messages. I receive too many messages from the world, and so I try to avoid that."
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"Ugliness is more inventive than beauty. Beauty always follows certain camps. I think it's more amusing - ugliness - than beauty."
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"Sometimes my characters are not myself."
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"Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets."
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