To read a paper book is another experience: you can do it on a ship, on the branch of a tree, on your bed, even if there is a blackout.
— Umberto Eco
Beauty is boring because it is predictable.
There is nothing more difficult to define than an aphorism.
When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.
The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.
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.
Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he was finding India but discovered America. History is full of events that happened because of an imaginary tale.
It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.
I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.
There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.
It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.
When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.
After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs.
Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.
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.
We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.
As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.
I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.
Dan Brown is a character from 'Foucault's Pendulum!' I invented him. He shares my characters' fascinations - the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.
With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the U.S.A. and China.
The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.
Today, political events are nullified unless they're on TV.
Our life is full of empty space.
Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.
Young people do not watch television; they are on the Internet.
Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis. The most exciting letters I received were from people in places like that.
I write what I write.
Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.
Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.
People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.
As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.
How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see.
My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn't visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.
At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.
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.
The grandeur of Jerusalem is also... its problem.
Many people who no longer go to church end up falling prey to superstition.
The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
Religion has nothing to do with God. It's a fundamental attitude of human beings, who ask about the origins of life and what happens after death. For many, the answer is a personal god. In my opinion, it's religion that produces God, not the other way round.
Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis.
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.
Berlusconi is a genius in communication. Otherwise, he would never have become so rich.
The most interesting letters I received about 'The Name of the Rose' were from people in the Midwest that maybe didn't understand exactly, but wanted to understand more and who were excited by this picture of a world which was not their own.
I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience.
It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.
I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.
But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.
We like lists because we don't want to die.
What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.
