Italian - Novelist | January 5, 1932 - February 19, 2016
Today, political events are nullified unless they're on TV.
Umberto Eco
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The United States needed a civil war to unite properly.
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Beauty is boring because it is predictable.
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Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.
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My maternal grandmother - she was a compulsive reader. She had only been through five grades of elementary school, but she was a member of the municipal library, and she brought home two or three books a week for me. They could be dime novels or Balzac.
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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.
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The mobile phone... is a tool for those whose professions require a fast response, such as doctors or plumbers.
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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.
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The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.
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The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
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Does the novel have to deepen the psychology of its heroes? Certainly the modern novel does, but the ancient legends did not do the same. Oedipus' psychology was deduced by Aeschylus or Freud, but the character is simply there, fixed in a pure and terribly disquieting state.
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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.
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