Quotes from Umberto Eco

What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?

The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon... The book has been thoroughly tested, and it's very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes.

I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare's tragedies.

Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.

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

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.

That is a real attitude - to see everything as being meaningful, even the less important things, to prove something, even the greater problems of life.

Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.

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.

The mobile phone... is a tool for those whose professions require a fast response, such as doctors or plumbers.

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.

The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.

I consider always the adult life to be the continuous retrieval of childhood.

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.

The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?

Berlusconi is a genius in communication. Otherwise, he would never have become so rich.

Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.

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.

A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appears to be funny.

"Then we are living in a place abandoned by God," I said, disheartened. "Have you found any places where God would have felt at home?" William asked me, looking down from his great height.

It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.

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.