Umberto Eco Zitate auf Englisch

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In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

Libraries can take the place of God.

Umberto Eco

Young people do not watch television; they are on the Internet.

Umberto Eco

Beauty is boring because it is predictable.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.

Umberto Eco

I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.

Umberto Eco

The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.

Umberto Eco

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

Umberto Eco

History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.

Umberto Eco

I write what I write.

Umberto Eco

People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.

Umberto Eco

As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

We are a pluralist civilisation because we allow mosques to be built in our countries, and we are not going to stop simply because Christian missionaries are thrown into prison in Kabul. If we did so, we, too, would become Taliban.

Umberto Eco

A secret is powerful when it is empty.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

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.

Umberto Eco

Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics.

Umberto Eco

If people buy my books for vanity, I consider it a tax on idiocy.

Umberto Eco

When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.

Umberto Eco

When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.

Umberto Eco