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
I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.
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.
Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another.
The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.
The Roseicrucians were everywhere, aided by the fact that they didn't exist.
True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.
If people buy my books for vanity, I consider it a tax on idiocy.
There are books on our shelves we haven't read and doubtless never will, that each of us has probably put to one side in the belief that we will read them later on, perhaps even in another life.
Berlusconi is a genius in communication. Otherwise, he would never have become so rich.
The grandeur of Jerusalem is also... its problem.
At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.
There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism.
Many people who no longer go to church end up falling prey to superstition.
Young people do not watch television; they are on the Internet.