Italian - Novelist | January 5, 1932 - February 19, 2016
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
Umberto Eco
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People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.
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I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.
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I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
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All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.
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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.
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Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.
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Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.
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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.
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Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respiration - acquire the pace. Otherwise you stop right away.
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If western culture is shown to be rich, it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to 'dissolve' harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind.
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It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.
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