823 Quotes by Umberto Eco

Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossibe courses are given. The school’s aim is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects.

It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with one’s own roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad.

If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you’re an idiot.

For two years I have refused to answer idle questions on the order of “Is your novel an open work or not?” How should I know? That is your business, not mine. Or “With which of your characters do you identify?” For God’s sake, with whom does an author identify? With the adverbs, obviously.

The thing whose address I lost is not the End, it’s the Beginning. Not the object to be possessed but the subject that possesses me. Misery.

A daily newspaper is destined to become like a weekly magazine. We’ll be talking about what might happen tomorrow, with feature articles, investigative supplements, unexpected predictions...

The cultivated person’s first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.

Omnia mundi creatura quasi liber et pictura nobis est in speculum.

I don’t believe one writes for oneself. I think that writing is an act of love- you write in order to give something to someone else. To communicate something. to have other people share your feelings. This problem of how long your work survives is fundamental for a novelist or a poet. One hopes for a sense of continuity.