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
Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.
My poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne.
All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.
One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
For Mallarmé naming an object meant suppressing three-quarters of its poetic pleasure (which consists in the joy of guessing bit by bit - "le suggérer, voilà le rêve!").
The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered.
I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.
Stopgaps do belong to the internal economy of the form, since the Whole requires them, even if only in a subordinate position ... The stopgap Luigi Paryson's 'zeppa' accepts its own banality, because without the speed that the banal allows up, it would slow up a passage that is crucial for the outcome of the work and its interpretation.
When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.
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.