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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.

-Umberto Eco

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Dan Brown, Is A

Umberto Eco

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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.

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More From Umberto Eco

The Comic Is The Perception Of The Opposite; Humor Is The Feeling Of It.

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.

Black And White

The Devil Is Not The Prince Of Matter; The Devil Is The Arrogance Of The Spirit, Faith Without Smile, Truth That Is Never Seized By Doubt. The Devil Is Grim Because He Knows Where He Is Going, And, In Moving, He Always Returns Whence He Came.

When Men Stop Believing In God, It Isn't That They Then Believe In Nothing: They Believe In Everything.

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.

Books Are Menaced By Books. Any Excess Of Information Produces Silence.

The Question Of Manuscript Changes Is Very Important For Literary Criticism, The Psychology Of Creation And Other Aspects Of The Study Of Literature.

There Is No Great Sport In Having Bullets Flying About One In Every Direction, But I Find They Have Less Horror When Among Them Than When In Anticipation.

Books Always Speak Of Other Books.

The Mobile Phone... Is A Tool For Those Whose Professions Require A Fast Response, Such As Doctors Or Plumbers.

Thus I Rediscovered What Writers Have Always Known (and Have Told Us Again And Again): Books Always Speak Of Other Books, And Every Story Tells A Story That Has Already Been Told.

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.

Libraries Are Fascinating Places: Sometimes You Feel You Are Under The Canopy Of A Railway Station, And When You Read Books About Exotic Places There's A Feeling Of Travelling To Distant Lands

Hypotyposis Is The Rhetorical Effect By Which Words Succeed In Rendering A Visual Scene.

National Identity Is The Last Bastion Of The Dispossessed. But The Meaning Of Identity Is Now Based On Hatred, On Hatred For Those Who Are Not The Same.

Fools Are In Great Demand, Especially On Social Occasions. They Embarrass Everyone But Provide Material For Conversation. In Their Positive Form, They Become Diplomats.

If Bush Had Read All The Documents About The Russians And British In Afghanistan In The 19th Century, He Would Have Not Done What He Did In The 21st. He Would Have Understood How Difficult It Was To Control This Territory. He Probably Didn't Read Them.

Libraries Have Always Been Humanities' Way Of Preserving Its Collective Wisdom

I Write Stories About Conspiracies And Paranoid Characters While I Am, In Fact, A Very Skeptical Person.

Each Of Us Is Sometimes A Cretin, A Fool, A Moron, Or A Lunatic. A Normal Person Is Just A Reasonable Mix Of These Components, These Four Ideal Types.

For Centuries, As Pope And Emperor Tore Each Other Apart In Their Quarrels Over Power, The Excluded Went On Living On The Fringe, Like Lepers, Of Whom True Lepers Are Only The Illustration Ordained By God To Make Us Understand This Wondrous Parable, So That In Saying 'lepers' We Would Understand 'outcast, Poor, Simple, Excluded, Uprooted From The Countryside, Humiliated In The Cities.' But We Did Not Understand; The Mystery Of Leprosy Has Continued To Haunt Us Because We Have Not Recognized The Nature Of The Sign.

Being A Professional Philosopher Is, I Would Say, Feeling Natural To Think About Small And Great Problems. It Is The Only Pleasure.

You Tell Me These Two Were My Parents, So Now I Know But It's A Memory That You've Given Me. I'll Remember The Photo From Now On, But Not Them.

Socrates ... Did Not Write. It Seems Academically Obvious That He Perished Because He Did Not Publish!

The Lunatic Is All Idée Fixe, And Whatever He Comes Across Confirms His Lunacy. You Can Tell Him By The Liberties He Takes With Common Sense, By His Flashes Of Inspiration, And By The Fact That Sooner Or Later He Brings Up The Templars.

I Believe That What We Become Depends On What Our Fathers Teach Us At Odd Moments, When They Aren't Trying To Teach Us. We Are Formed By Little Scraps Of Wisdom.

The Hand Of God Creates; It Does Not Conceal.

I Was The Type Who Looked At Discussions Of What Is Truth Only With A View Toward Correcting The Manuscript. If You Were To Quote "i Am That I Am," For Example, I Thought That The Fundamental Problem Was Where To Put The Comma, Inside The Quotation Marks Or Outside.

Quotation Marks

When The Writer (or The Artist In General) Says He Has Worked Without Giving Any Thought To The Rules Of The Process, He Simply Means He Was Working Without Realizing He Knew The Rules.

A Writer Writes For Writers, A Non-writer Writes For His Next-door Neighbor Or For The Manager Of The Local Bank Branch, And He Fears (often Mistakenly) That They Would Not Understand Or, In Any Case, Would Not Forgive His Boldness.

We Know That Sensory Phenomena Are Transcribed In The Photographic Emulsion In Such A Way That Even If There Is A Causal Link With The Real Phenomena, The Graphic Images Can Be Considered As Wholly Arbitrary With Respect To These Phenomena.

With All Of Its Defects, The Global Market Makes War Less Likely, Even Between The Usa And China.

The United States Needed A Civil War To Unite Properly.

I Love The Smell Of Book Ink In The Morning.

A Monk Should Surely Love His Books With Humility, Wishing Their Good And Not The Glory Of His Own Curiosity; But What The Temptation Of Adultery Is For Laymen And The Yearning For Riches Is For Secular Ecclesiastics, The Seduction Of Knowledge Is For Monks.

Political Satire Is A Serious Thing. In Democratic Newspapers Throughout The World There Are Daily Cartoons That Often Are Not Even Funny, As Is The Case Especially In Many English-language Newspapers. Instead, They Contain A Political Message, And The Artist Takes Full Responsibility.

I Think A Book Should Be Judged 10 Years Later, After Reading And Re-reading It.

The More Things You Know, Or Pretend To Know, The More Powerful You Are. It Doesn't Matter If The Things Are True. What Counts, Remember, Is To Possess A Secret.

The Step Between Ecstatic Vision And Sinful Frenzy Is All Too Brief.

To Survive, You Must Tell Stories.

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.

The Older I Grow And The More I Abandon Myself To God's Will, The Less I Value Intelligence That Wants To Know And Will That Wants To Do; And As The Only Element Of Salvation I Recognize Faith, Which Can Wait Patiently, Without Asking Too Many Questions.

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.

And What Would We Be, We Sinful Creatures, Without Fear, Perhaps The Most Foresighted, The Most Loving Of The Divine Gifts?

I Am An Old Consumer Of Papers. I Cannot Avoid Reading My Newspapers Every Morning.

But I Had Also Learned That Freedom Of Speech Means Freedom From Rhetoric.

Freedom Of Speech

If You Interact With Things In Your Life, Everything Is Constantly Changing. And If Nothing Changes, You're An Idiot.

A Democratic Civilization Will Save Itself Only If It Makes The Language Of The Image Into A Stimulus For Critical Reflection - Not An Invitation For Hypnosis.

A Novel Is A Machine For Generating Interpretations.

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.

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.

It Was Awkward, Revisiting A World You Have Never Seen Before: Like Coming Home, After A Long Journey, To Someone Else’s House.

For What I Saw At The Abbey Then (and Will Now Recount) Caused Me To Think That Often Inquisitors Create Heretics. And Not Only In The Sense That They Imagine Heretics Where These Do Not Exist, But Also That Inquisitors Repress The Heretical Putrefaction So Vehemently That Many Are Driven To Share In It, In Their Hatred For The Judges. Truly, A Circle Conceived By The Devil. God Preserve Us.

Yesterday's Rose Endures In Its Name, We Hold Empty Names.

When We Traded The Results Of Our Fantasies, It Seemed To Us-and Rightly-that We Had Proceeded By Unwarranted Associations, By Shortcuts So Extraordinary That, If Anyone Had Accused Us Of Really Believing Them, We Would Have Been Ashamed.

Every Man Is Obsessed By The Memories Of His Own Youth.

I Am A Professor Who Writes Novels On Sundays

Is It Worth It To Be Born If You Cannot Remember It Later? And, Technically Speaking, Had I Ever Been Born? Other People, Of Course, Said That I Was. As Far As I Know, I Was Born In Late April, At Sixty Years Of Age, In A Hospital Room.

Certainly, Light Fiction Exists And Encompasses Mysteries Or Second-class Romance Novels, Books That Are Read On The Beach, Whose Only Aim Is To Entertain. These Books Are Not Concerned With Style Or Creativity - Instead They Are Successful Because They Are Repetitive And Follow A Template That Readers Enjoy.

The Function Of Memory Is Not Only To Preserve, But Also To Throw Away. If You Remembered Everything From Your Entire Life, You Would Be Sick.

Deciding What Is Being Talked About Is A Kind Of Interpretive Bet.

A Book Is A Fragile Creature. It Suffers The Wear Of Time, It Fears Rodents, The Elements, Clumsy Hands.

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.

The More Elusive And Ambiguous A Symbol Is, The More It Gains Significance And Power.

It Is Necessary To Meditate Early, And Often, On The Art Of Dying To Succeed Later In Doing It Properly Just Once.

It Is A Myth Of Publishers That People Want To Read Easy Things.

After So Many Years Even The Fire Of Passion Dies, And With It What Was Believed The Light Of The Truth. Who Of Us Is Able To Say Now Whether Hector Or Achilles Was Right, Agamemnon Or Priam, When They Fought Over The Beauty Of A Woman Who Is Now Dust And Ashes?

I Seem To Know All The Cliches, But Not How To Put Them Together In A Believable Way. Or Else These Stories Are Terrible And Grandiose Precisely Because All The Cliches Intertwine In An Unrealistic Way And You Can't Disentangle Them. But When You Actually Live A Cliche, It Feels Brand New, And You Are Unashamed.

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.

A Narrator Should Not Supply Interpretations Of His Work; Otherwise He Would Have Not Written A Novel, Which Is A Machine For Generating Interpretations.

As An Adolescent I Wrote Comic Books, Because I Read Lots Of Them, And Fantasy Novels Set In Malaysia And Central Africa.

Mystical Additions And Subtractions Always Come Out The Way You Want.

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.

Media Populism Means Appealing To People Directly Through Media. A Politician Who Can Master The Media Can Shape Political Affairs Outside Of Parliament And Even Eliminate The Mediation Of Parliament.

A Mystic Is A Hysteric Who Has Met Her Confessor Before Her Doctor.

How Clear Everything Becomes When You Look From The Darkness Of A Dungeon.

Any Fact Becomes Important When It's Connected To Another.

The Art Of The Romance, Though Warning Us That It Is Providing Fictions, Opens A Door Into The Palace Of Absurdity, And When We Have Lightly Stepped Inside, Slams It Shut Behind Us.

I Developed A Passion For The Middle Ages The Same Way Some People Develop A Passion For Coconuts.

I Would Define The Poetic Effect As The Capacity That A Text Displays For Continuing To Generate Different Readings, Without Ever Being Completely Consumed.

I'm Always Fascinated By Losers. Also, In My "foucault's Pendulum," The Main Characters, Who Are In A Way Losers, They Are More Interesting Than The Winners.

Not That The Incredulous Person Doesn't Believe In Anything. It's Just That He Doesn't Believe In Everything.

I Dared, For The First And Last Time In My Life, To Express A Theological Conclusion: "but How Can A Necessary Being Exist Totally Polluted With The Possible? What Difference Is There, Then, Between God And Primogenial Chaos? Isn't Affirming God's Absolute Omnipotence And His Absolute Freedom With Regard To His Own Choices Tantamount To Demonstrating That God Does Not Exist?

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.

You Always Want Someone To Hate In Order To Feel Justified In Your Own Misery. Hatred Is The True Primordial Passion. It Is Love That's Abnormal. That Is Why Christ Was Killed: He Spoke Against Nature. You Don't Love Someone For Your Whole Life - That Impossible Hope Is The Source Of Adultery, Matricide, Betrayal Of Friends ... But You Can Hate Someone For Your Whole Life - Provided He's Always There To Keep Your Hatred Alive. Hatred Warms The Heart.

This, In Fact, Is The Power Of The Imagination, Which, Combining The Memory Of Gold With That Of The Mountain, Can Compose The Idea Of A Golden Mountain.

I Love The Secrecy Of Writing Fiction. When I Write A Novel, I Don't Tell Anybody What I'm Doing. I'm Living In My Private World. And It's A Great Sensation.

Homer's Work Hits Again And Again On The Topos Of The Inexpressible. People Will Always Do That.

Again And Again

American Coffee Can Be A Pale Solution Served At A Temperature Of 100 Degrees Centigrade In Plastic Thermos Cups, Usually Obligatory In Railroad Stations For Purposes Of Genocide, Whereas Coffee Made With An American Percolator, Such As You Find In Private Houses Or In Humble Luncheonettes, Served With Eggs And Bacon, Is Delicious, Fragrant, Goes Down Like Pure Spring Water, And Afterwards Causes Severe Palpitations, Because One Cup Contains More Caffeine Than Four Espressos.

An Idea You Have Might Not Be Original. But By Creating A Novel Out Of That Idea You Can Make It Original.

The Fundamental Principle That Governs - Or Ought To Govern -human Affairs If We Wish To Avoid Misunderstandings, Conflicts, Or Pointless Utopias, Is Negotiation.

If Culture Did Not Filter, It Would Be Inane - As Inane As The Formless, Boundless Internet Is On Its Own. And If We All Possessed The Boundless Knowledge Of The Web, We Would Be Idiots! Culture Is An Instrument For Making A Hierarchical System Of Intellectual Labor.

At Most, Recognizing That Our History Was Inspired By Many Tales We Now Recognize As False Should Make Us Alert, Ready To Call To Constantly Into Question The Very Tale We Believe True, Because The Criterion Of The Wisdom Of The Community Is Based On Constant Awareness Of The Fallibility Of Our Learning.

Beauty Has Never Been Absolute And Immutable But Has Taken On Different Aspects Depending On The Historical Period And The Country

The Photograph [of Che Guevara], For A Civilization Now Accustomed To Thinking In Images, Was Not The Description Of A Single Event... It Was An Argument.

Idiot. Above Her Head Was The Only Stable Point In The Cosmos, The Only Refuge From The Damnation Of The Panta Rei, And She Guessed It Was The Pendulum's Business. A Moment Later The Couple Went Off -- He, Trained On Some Textbook That Had Blunted His Capacity For Wonder, She, Inert And Insensitive To The Thrill Of The Infinite, Both Oblivious Of The Awesomeness Of Their Encounter -- Their First And Last Encounter -- With The One, The Ein-sof, The Ineffable. How Could You Fail To Kneel Down Before This Altar Of Certitude?

In The United States, Politics Is A Profession, Whereas In Europe It Is A Right And A Duty .

For Many Years I Have Devoted Articles And Essays To Newspapers, From The Inside. So Criticism Of The Newspapers Was A Topic That I Practiced For A Long Time.

I Don't Miss My Youth. I'm Glad I Had One, But I Wouldn't Like To Start Over.

All The Theories Of Conspiracy Were Always A Way To Escape Our Responsibilities. It Is A Very Important Kind Of Social Sickness By Which We Avoid Recognizing Reality Such As It Is And Avoid Our Responsibilities.

To Read Fiction Means To Play A Game By Which We Give Sense To The Immensity Of Things That Happened, Are Happening, Or Will Happen In The Actual World. By Reading Narrative, We Escape The Anxiety That Attacks Us When We Try To Say Something True About The World. This Is The Consoling Function Of Narrative — The Reason People Tell Stories, And Have Told Stories From The Beginning Of Time.

But Why Doesn't The Gospel Ever Say That Christ Laughed?" I Asked, For No Good Reason. "is Jorge Right?" "legions Of Scholars Have Wondered Whether Christ Laughed. The Question Doesn't Interest Me Much. I Believe He Never Laughed, Because, Omniscient As The Son Of God Had To Be, He Knew How We Christians Would Behave. . . .

The Court Jester Had The Right To Say The Most Outrageous Things To The King. Everything Was Permitted During Carnival, Even The Songs That The Roman Legionnaires Would Sing, Calling Julius Caesar "queen", Alluding, In A Very Transparent Way, To His Real, Or Presumed, Homosexual Escapades.

The Monkish Vows Keep Us Far From That Sink Of Vice That Is The Female Body, But Often They Bring Us Close To Other Errors. Can I Finally Hide From Myself The Fact That Even Today My Old Age Is Still Stirred By The Noonday Demon When My Eyes, In Choir, Happen To Linger On The Beardless Face Of A Novice, Pure And Fresh As A Maidens?

You Don't Fall In Love Because You Fall In Love; You Fall In Love Because Of The Need, Desperate, To Fall In Love. When You Feel That Need, You Have To Watch Your Step: Like Having Drunk A Philter, The Kind That Makes You Fall In Love With The First Thing You Meet. It Could Be A Duck-billed Platypus.

Falling In Love

One Can Be A Great Poet And Be Politically Stupid.

The Good Of A Book Lies In Its Being Read. A Book Is Made Up Of Signs That Speak Of Other Signs, Which In Their Turn Speak Of Things. Without An Eye To Read Them, A Book Contains Signs That Produce No Concepts; Therefore It Is Dumb.

Ugliness Is More Inventive Than Beauty. Beauty Always Follows Certain Camps. I Think It's More Amusing - Ugliness - Than Beauty.

Is It Possible To Say "it Was A Beautiful Morning At The End Of November" Without Feeling Like Snoopy?

What Does Culture Want? To Make Infinity Comprehensible.

What We Honor As Prudence In Our Elders Is Simply Panic In Action.

Today I Realize That Many Recent Exercises In "deconstructive Reading" Read As If Inspired By My Parody. This Is Parody's Mission: It Must Never Be Afraid Of Going Too Far. If Its Aim Is True, It Simply Heralds What Others Will Later Produce, Unblushing, With Impassive And Assertive Gravity.

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.

The Real Hero Is Always A Hero By Mistake.

Contemporary Societies Have Lost The Sense Of The Feast But Have Kept The Obscure Drive For It.

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.

Yes, I Know, It's Not The Truth, But In A Great History Little Truths Can Be Altered So That The Greater Truth Emerges.

By Means Of The Sign, Man Frees Himself From The Here And Now For Abstraction.

Nothing Gives A Fearful Man More Courage Than Another's Fear.

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.

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.

Absence Is To Love As Wind Is To Fire: It Extinguishes The Little Flame, It Fans The Big.

Love Is Wiser Than Wisdom.

... Luckily, Eden Is Soon Populated. The Ethical Dimension Begins When The Other Appears On The Scene.

Authors Frequently Say Things They Are Unaware Of; Only After They Have Gotten The Reactions Of Their Readers Do They Discover What They Have Said

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.

The Belief That Time Is A Linear, Directed Sequence Running From A To B Is A Modern Illusion. In Fact, It Can Also Go From B To A, The Effect Producing The Cause.

Reflecting On These Complex Relationships Between Reader And Story, Fiction And Life, Can Constitute A Form Of Therapy Against The Sleep Of Reason, Which Generates Monsters.

On Sober Reflection, I Find Few Reasons For Publishing My Italian Version Of An Obscure, Neo-gothic French Version Of A Seventeenth Century Latin Edition Of A Work Written In Latin By A German Monk Toward The End Of The Fourteenth Century...first Of All, What Style Should I Employ?

I Started To Write [the Name Of The Rose] In March Of 1978, Moved By A Seminal Idea. I Wanted To Poison A Monk.

All Of Us Were Slowly Losing That Intellectual Light That Allows You Always To Tell The Similar From The Identical, The Metaphorical From The Real.

For The Enemy To Be Recognized And Feared, He Has To Be In Your Home Or On Your Doorstep.

When All The Archetypes Burst Out Shamelessly, We Plumb The Depths Of Homeric Profundity. Two Clichés Make Us Laugh But A Hundred Clichés Moves Us Because We Sense Dimly That The Clichés Are Talking Among Themselves, Celebrating A Reunion. . . . Just As The Extreme Of Pain Meets Sensual Pleasure, And The Extreme Of Perversion Borders On Mystical Energy, So Too The Extreme Of Banality Allows Us To Catch A Glimpse Of The Sublime.

A Newspaper Can Follow The Compulsions, The Desires Of The Readers. Take The English Evening Newspapers - They Are Following The Readers' Desires When They Are Interested Only In The Royal Family Gossip. But Even The Most Objective, Serious Newspaper In The World Designs The Way In Which The Reader Could Or Should Think. That's Unavoidable.

The Author Should Die Once He Has Finished Writing. So As Not To Trouble The Path Of The Text.

Narrativity Presumes A Special Taste For Plot. And This Taste For Plot Was Always Very Present In The Anglo-saxon Countries And That Explains Their High Quality Of Detective Novels.

Since I Became A Novelist I Have Discovered That I Am Biased. Either I Think A New Novel Is Worse Than Mine And I Don’t Like It, Or I Suspect It Is Better Than My Novels And I Don’t Like It.

The Thought That All Experience Will Be Lost At The Moment Of My Death Makes Me Feel Pain And Fear... What A Waste, Decades Spent Building Up Experience, Only To Throw It All Away... We Remedy This Sadness By Working. For Example, By Writing, Painting, Or Building Cities.

If Two Things Don't Fit, But You Believe Both Of Them, Thinking That Somewhere, Hidden, There Must Be A Third Thing That Connects Them, That's Credulity.

He Who Falls In Love In Bars Doesn't Need A Woman All His Own. He Can Always Find One On Loan.

Whenever A Poet Or Preacher, Chief Or Wizard Spouts Gibberish, The Human Race Spends Centuries Deciphering The Message.

But It Has Often Happened That I Have Found The Most Seductive Depictions Of Sin In The Pages Of Those Very Men Of Incorruptible Virtue Who Condemned Their Spell And Their Effects.

People Are Tired Of Simple Things. They Want To Be Challenged.

I Was In A Maze. No Matter Which Way I Turned, It Was The Wrong Way.

It Is Psychologically Very Hard To Go Through Life Without The Justification, And The Hope, Provided By Religion.

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.

Someone Said That Patriotism Is The Last Refuge Of Cowards; Those Without Moral Principles Usually Wrap A Flag Around Themselves, And Those Bastards Always Talk About The Purity Of Race.

When You Are On The Dancefloor, There Is Nothing To Do But Dance.

The Truth Is An Anagram Of An Anagram.

The Void Is Not Being, But Not Being Cannot Be, Ergo The Void Cannot Be. The Reasoning Was Sound, Because It Denied The Void While Granting That It Could Be Conceived. In Fact, We Can Quite Easily Conceive Things That Do Not Exist. Can A Chimera, Buzzing In The Void, Devour Second Intentions? No, Because Chimeras Do Not Exist, In The Void No Buzzing Can Be Heard, And Intentions Are Mental Things - An Intended Pear Does Not Nourish Us. And Yet I Can Think Of A Chimera Even If It Is Chimerical, Namely, If It Is Not. And The Same With The Void.

Sometimes You Say Things With A Smile With The Precise Intention Of Making It Clear That You Are Not Being Serious, And Are Only Kidding. If I Salute A Friend With A Smile And Say, "how Are You, You Old Scoundrel!" Clearly I Don't Really Mean He's A Scoundrel.

I Think That At A Certain Age, Say Fifteen Or Sixteen, Poetry Is Like Masturbation. But Later In Life Good Poets Burn Their Early Poetry, And Bad Poets Publish It. Thankfully I Gave Up Rather Quickly.

Daytime Sleep Is Like The Sin Of The Flesh; The More You Have The More You Want, And Yet You Feel Unhappy, Sated And Unsated At The Same Time.

Beauty Is, In Some Way, Boring. Even If Its Concept Changes Through The Ages... A Beautiful Object Must Always Follow Certain Rules. A Beautiful Nose Shouldn't Be Longer Than That Or Shorter Than That, On The Contrary, An Ugly Nose Can Be As Long As The One Of Pinocchio, Or As Big As The Trunk Of An Elephant, Or Like The Beak Of An Eagle, And So Ugliness Is Unpredictable, And Offers An Infinite Range Of Possibility. Beauty Is Finite, Ugliness Is Infinite Like God.

A Great Problem Of The Internet Is How To Filter Information, How To Discard What Is Not Relevant Or What Is Silly And To Keep Only The Important Information.

Libraries Can Take The Place Of God.

He Had Prepared His Death Much Earlier, In His Imagination, Unaware That His Imagination, More Creative Than He, Was Planning The Reality Of That Death.

Creativity Can Only Be Anarchic, Capitalist, Darwinian.

The Order That Our Mind Imagines Is Like A Net, Or Like A Ladder, Built To Attain Something. But Afterward You Must Throw The Ladder Away, Because You Discover That, Even If It Was Useful, It Was Meaningless.

Conspiracies Do Exist. Probably In This Moment In New York There Is An Economic Group Making A Conspiracy In Order To Buy Three Banks. But If They Succeed, They Are Immediately Discovered.

The Author May Not Interpret. But He Must Tell Why And How He Wrote His Book.

They [the Templars] Had Read Avicenna, And They Were Not Ignorant, Like The Europeans. How Could You Live Alongside A Tolerant, Mystical, Libertine Culture For Two Centuries Without Succumbing To Its Allure, Particularly When You Compared It To Western Culture, Which Was Crude, Vulgar, Barbaric, And Germanic?

Western Culture

The Followers Must Feel Besieged.

But The Purpose Of A Story Is To Teach And To Please At Once, And What It Teaches Is How To Recognize The Snares Of The World.

We Live For Books.

My Collection Of Rare Books Concerns Only Books That Don't Tell The Truth.

Telling The Truth

There Is Only One Thing That Arouses Animals More Than Pleasure, And That Is Pain. Under Torture You Are As If Under The Dominion Of Those Grasses That Produce Visions. Everything You Have Heard Told, Everything You Have Read Returns To Your Mind, As If You Were Being Transported, Not Toward Heaven, But Toward Hell. Under Torture You Say Not Only What The Inquisitor Wants, But Also What You Imagine Might Please Him, Because A Bond (this, Truly, Diabolical) Is Established Between You And Him.

I Felt Like Poisoning A Monk.

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.

True Learning Must Not Be Content With Ideas, Which Are, In Fact, Signs, But Must Discover Things In Their Individual Truth.

New Orleans Is Not In The Grip Of A Neurosis Of A Denied Past; It Passes Out Memories Generously Like A Great Lord; It Doesn't Have To Pursue "the Real Thing."

A Dream Is A Scripture, And Many Scriptures Are Nothing But Dreams.

Nothing Is More Fleeting Than External Form, Which Withers And Alters Like The Flowers Of The Field At The Appearance Of Autumn.

Stopgaps Do Belong To The Internal Economy Of The Form, Since The Whole Requires Them, Even If Only In A Subordinate Position ... The Stopgap Luigi Paryson's 'zeppa' Accepts Its Own Banality, Because Without The Speed That The Banal Allows Up, It Would Slow Up A Passage That Is Crucial For The Outcome Of The Work And Its Interpretation.

Sometimes My Characters Are Not Myself.

Our Most Noted Satirists Are True Columnists And Their Opinions Can Be Worth More Than Any Well-documented Exposé.

Because Of Lies, We Can Produce And Invent A Possible World.

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.

Terrorism [is] A Biological Consequence Of The Multinationals, Just As A Day Of Fever Is The Reasonable Price Of An Effective Vaccine . . . The Conflict Is Between Great Powers, Not Between Demons And Heroes. Unhappily, Therefore, Is The Nation That Finds The "heroes" Underfoot, Especially If They Still Think In Religious Terms And Involve The Population In Their Bloody Ascent To An Uninhabited Paradise.

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.

Your Masters At Oxford Have Taught You To Idolize Reason, Drying Up The Prophetic Capacities Of Your Heart!

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.

Western Culture

Given That There Are Seven Billion People Living On This Earth, There Is A Consistent Quantity Of Imbecile Or Idiot, Okay. Previously, These People Could Express Themselves Only With Their Friends Or At The Bar After Two Or Three Glasses Of Something, And They Said Every Silliness, And People Laughed. Now They Have The Possibility To Show Up On The Internet. And So, On The Internet, Along With The Messages Of A Lot Of Interesting And Important People - Even The Pope Is Writing On Twitter - We Have A Great Quantity Of Idiots.

All The Blogs, Facebook, Twitter Are Made By People Who Want To Show Their Own Private Affairs At The Price Of Making Fakes, To Try To Appear Such As They Are Not, To Construct Another Personality, Which Is A Veritable Loss Of Identity.

The Only Truths That Are Useful Are Instruments To Be Thrown Away.

A Secret Is Powerful When It Is Empty. People Often Mention The "masonic Secret." What On Earth Is The Masonic Secret? No One Can Tell. As Long As It Remains Empty It Can Be Filled Up With Every Possible Notion, And It Has Power.

And When Someone Suggests You Believe In A Proposition, You Must First Examine It To See Whether It Is Acceptable, Because Our Reason Was Created By God, And Whatever Pleases Our Reason Can But Please Divine Reason, Of Which, For That Matter, We Know Only What We Infer From The Processes Of Our Own Reason By Analogy And Often By Negation.

Perhaps The Mission Of Those Who Love Mankind Is To Make People Laugh At The Truth, To Make Truth Laugh, Because The Only Truth Lies In Learning To Free Ourselves From Insane Passion For The Truth.

History Is A Blood-drenched Enigma And The World An Error.

Thus We Have On Stage Two Men, Each Of Whom Knows Nothing Of What He Believes The Other Knows, And To Deceive Each Other Reciprocally Both Speak In Allusions, Each Of The Two Hoping (in Vain) That The Other Holds The Key To His Puzzle.

Nothing Can Shake My Belief That This World Is The Fruit Of A Dark God Whose Shadow I Extend.

I Do Not Remember Where I Read That There Are Two Kinds Of Poets: The Good Poets, Who At A Certain Point Destroy Their Bad Poems And Go Off To Run Guns In Africa, And The Bad Poets, Who Publish Theirs And Keep Writing More Until They Die.

Better Reality Than A Dream: If Something Is Real, Then It's Real And You're Not To Blame.

I Suspect That There Is No Serious Scholar Who Doesn’t Like To Watch Television. I’m Just The Only One Who Confesses.

The Ideology Of This America Wants To Establish Reassurance Through Imitation. But Profit Defeats Ideology, Because The Consumers Want To Be Thrilled Not Only By The Guarantee Of The Good But Also By The Shudder Of The Bad.

There Must Be A Connection Between The Lust For Power And Impotentia Coeundi. I Liked Marx, I Was Sure That He And His Jenny Had Made Love Merrily. You Can Feel It In The Easy Pace Of His Prose And In His Humor. On The Other Hand, I Remember Remarking One Day In The Corridors Of The University That If You Screwed Krupskaya All The Time, You'd End Up Writing A Lousy Book Like Materialism And Empiriocriticism.

Show Not What Has Been Done, But What Can Be. How Beautiful The World Would Be If There Were A Procedure For Moving Through Labyrinths.

The Wise Man Does Not Discriminate; He Gathers All The Shreds Of Light, From Wherever They May Come.

When One Starts Writing A Book, Especially A Novel, Even The Humblest Person In The World Hopes To Become Homer.

To Escape The Power Of The Unknown, To Prove To Yourself That You Don't Believe In It, You Accept Its Spells. Like An Avowed Atheist Who Sees The Devil At Night, You Reason: He Certainly Doesn't Exist; This Is Therefore An Illusion, Perhaps A Result Of Indigestion. But The Devil Is Sure That He Exists, And Believes In His Upside-down Theology. What, Then, Will Frighten Him? You Make The Sign Of The Cross, And He Vanishes In A Puff Of Brimstone.

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