Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco OMRIwas an Italian novelist, literary critic, philosopher, semiotician and university professor. He is best known internationally for his 1980 historical mystery novel Il nome della rosa, an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, with biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory. He later wrote other novels, including Il pendolo di Foucaultand L'isola del giorno prima. His novel Il cimitero di Praga, released in 2010, was a best-seller...
NationalityItalian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth5 January 1932
CountryItaly
Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.
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.
I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.
One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.
Libraries can take the place of God.
It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion.
It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.
If somebody writes a book and doesn't care for the survival of that book, he's an imbecile.
I was a fervent Catholic, and I belonged to the national organizations, even becoming one of the national leaders, until the age of 21, 22.
I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.
I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.
Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.
The west has decided to channel money and effort into studying other customs and practices, but no one has really given other people the chance to study western customs and practices, except at schools maintained by white expatriates, or by allowing the rich from other cultures to study in Oxford or Paris. What happens then is that they return home to organise fundamentalist movements, because they feel solidarity with those of their compatriots who lack the opportunity for such education.