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For Such Is The Fate Of Parody: It Must Never Fear Exaggerating. If It Strikes Home, It Will Only Prefigure Something That Others Will Then Do Without A Smile--and Without A Blush--in Steadfast Virile Seriousness.

-Umberto Eco

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For Such Is The

Umberto Eco

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For Such Is The Fate Of Parody: It Must Never Fear Exaggerating. If It Strikes Home, It Will Only Prefigure Something That Others Will Then Do Without A Smile--and Without A Blush--in Steadfast Virile Seriousness.

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

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

If You Want To Use Television To Teach Somebody, You Must First Teach Them How To Use Television.

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 Library's Ideal Function Is To Be A Little Bit Like A Bouquiniste's Stall, A Place For Trouvailles.

The Roseicrucians Were Everywhere, Aided By The Fact That They Didn't Exist.

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.

My Generation Knew Pretty Well What Happened 50 Years Before Our Birth. Now I Follow All The Quiz Programs Because They Are A Paramount Example Of The Span Of Memory Of The Young Generation - They Are Able To Remember Everything That Happened In Their Life But Not Before.

Remembers Everything

Young Generation

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

In Short, Roberto Privately Concluded, If You Would Avoid Wars, Never Make Treaties Of Peace.

Rem Tene, Verba Sequentur: Grasp The Subject, And The Words Will Follow. This, I Believe, Is The Opposite Of What Happens With Poetry, Which Is More A Case Of Verba Tene, Res Sequenter: Grasp The Words, And The Subject Will Follow.

Semiotics Is In Principle The Discipline Studying Everything Which Can Be Used In Order To Lie. If Something Cannot Be Used To Tell A Lie, Conversely It Cannot Be Used To Tell The Truth: It Cannot In Fact Be Used "to Tell" At All.

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.

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.

Whoever Reflects On Four Things I Would Be Better If He Were Never Born: That Which Is Above, That Which Is Below, That Which Is Before, That Which Is After.

A Novel Is A Machine For Generating Interpretations.

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.

He Who Laughs Does Not Believe In What He Laughs At, But Neither Does He Hate It. Therefore, Laughing At Evil Means Not Preparing Oneself To Combat It, And Laughing At Good Means Denying The Power Through Which Good Is Self-propagating.

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.

You Can Be Obsessed By Remorse All Your Life, Not Because You Chose The Wrong Thing- You Can Always Repent, Atone : But Because You Never Had The Chance To Prove To Yourself That You Would Have Chosen The Right Thing.

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

The Truth Is A Young Maiden As Modest As She Is Beautiful, And Therefore She Is Always Seen Cloaked.

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.

Listening Doesn't Mean Trying To Understand. Anything, However Trifling, May Be Of Use One Day. What Matters Is To Know Something That Others Don't Know You Know.

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

The Faith A Movement Proclaims Doesn't Count: What Counts Is The Hope It Offers. All Heresies Are The Banner Of A Reality, An Exclusion. Scratch The Heresy And You Will Find The Leper. Every Battle Against Heresy Wants Only This: To Keep The Leper As He Is.

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.

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

The Print Does Not Always Have The Same Shape As The Body That Impressed It, And It Doesn't Always Derive From The Pressure Of A Body. At Times It Reproduces The Impression A Body Has Left In Our Mind: It Is The Print Of An Idea.

We Live For Books.

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.

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.

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.

Books Are Not Made To Be Believed, But To Be Subjected To Inquiry. When We Consider A Book, We Mustn't Ask Ourselves What It Says But What It Means.

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.

Two Cliches Make Us Laugh. A Hundred Cliches Move Us. For We Sense Dimly That The Cliches Are Talking Among Themselves, And Celebrating A Reunion.

I Felt Like Poisoning A Monk.

All Poets Write Bad Poetry. Bad Poets Publish Them, Good Poets Burn Them.

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

[in My Writing] I Know That I Have Made A Caricature Out Of [others' Academic] Theories [but] I Think That Caricatures Are Frequently Good Portraits.

And So I Fell Devoutly Asleep And Slept A Long Time, Because Young People Seem To Need Sleep More Than The Old, Who Have Already Slept So Much And Are Preparing To Sleep For All Eternity.

The Good Of A Book Lies In Its Being Read.

We Have A Limit, A Very Discouraging, Humiliating Limit: Death.

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

I Enjoyed Your Article, But I Preferred My Own.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

Books Always Speak Of Other Books.

I Like Nicotine Because It Excites My Brain And Helps Me Work.

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.

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.

I Don't Know, Maybe We're Always Looking For The Right Place, Maybe It's Within Reach, But We Don't Recognize It. Maybe To Recognize It, We Have To Believe In It.

If Photography Is To Be Likened To Perception, This Is Not Because The Former Is A Natural Process But Because The Latter Is Also Coded.

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.

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.

We Have A Limit, A Very Discouraging, Humiliating Limit: Death. That's Why We Like All The Things That We Assume Have No Limits And, Therefore, No End. It's A Way Of Escaping Thoughts About Death. We Like Lists Because We Don't Want To Die.

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

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.

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.

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.

You Are Always Born Under The Wrong Sign, And To Live In This World Properly You Have To Rewrite Your Own Horoscope Day By Day.

Libraries Can Take The Place Of God.

Fear Prophets And Those Prepared To Die For The Truth, For As A Rule They Make Many Others Die With Them, Often Before Them, At Times Instead Of Them.

That Day, I Began To Be Incredulous. Or, Rather, I Regretted Having Been Credulous. I Regretted Having Allowed Myself To Be Borne Away By A Passion Of The Mind. Such Is Credulity.

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.

Even Today, I Frequently Meet Scientists Who, Outside Their Own Narrow Discipline, Are Superstitious.

When Your True Enemies Are Too Strong, You Have To Choose Weaker Enemies.

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.

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

I Have A Good Memory. But I Would Be Interested In Memory Even If I Had A Bad Memory, Because I Believe That Memory Is Our Soul. If We Lose Our Memory Completely, We Are Without A Soul.

There Is Only One Thing That You Write For Yourself, And That Is A Shopping List.

Until Then I Had Thought Each Book Spoke Of The Things, Human Or Divine, That Lie Outside Books. Now I Realized That Not Infrequently Books Speak Of Books: It Is As If They Spoke Among Themselves. In The Light Of This Reflection, The Library Seemed All The More Disturbing To Me. It Was Then The Place Of A Long, Centuries-old Murmuring, An Imperceptible Dialogue Between One Parchment And Another, A Living Thing, A Receptacle Of Powers Not To Be Ruled By A Human Mind, A Treausre Of Secrets Emanated By Many Minds, Surviving The Death Of Those Who Had Produced Them Or Had Been Their Conveyors.

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.

I Discovered ... That A Novel Has Nothing To Do With Words In The First Instance. Writing A Novel Is A Cosmological Matter, Like The Story Told By Genesis (we All Have To Choose Our Role Models, As Woody Allen Puts It).

Creativity Can Only Be Anarchic, Capitalist, Darwinian.

Man's Principle Trait Is A Readiness To Believe Anything. Otherwise, How Could The Church Have Survived For Almost Two Thousand Years In The Absense Of Universal Gullibility?

There Are Four Kinds Of People In This World: Cretins, Fools, Morons, And Lunatics.

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

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.

"then We Are Living In A Place Abandoned By God," I Said, Disheartened. "have You Found Any Places Where God Would Have Felt At Home?" William Asked Me, Looking Down From His Great Height.

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

The Real Hero Is Always A Hero By Mistake; He Dreams Of Being An Honest Coward Like Everybody Else.

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.

There Are Four Types: The Cretin, The Imbecile, The Stupid And The Mad. Normality Is A Balanced Mixture Of All Four.

Simple Mechanisms Do Not Love.

I Always Assume That A Good Book Is More Intelligent Than Its Author. It Can Say Things That The Writer Is Not Aware Of.

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.

There Are More People Than You Think Who Want To Have A Challenging Experience, In Which They Are Obliged To Reflect About The Past.

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 First Quality Of An Honest Man Is Contempt For Religion, Which Would Have Us Afraid Of The Most Natural Thing In The World, Which Is Death; And Would Have Us Hate The One Beautiful Thing Destiny Has Given Us, Which Is Life.

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.

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

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 Thing Thinks, But According To Its Complexity. If This Is So, Then Stones Also Think...and This Stone Thinks Only I Stone, I Stone, I Stone. But Perhaps It Cannot Even Say I. It Thinks: Stone, Stone, Stone... God Enjoys Being All, As This Stone Enjoys Being Almost Nothing, But Since It Knows No Other Way Of Being, It Is Pleased With Its Own Way, Eternally Satisfied With Itself.

I Am Firmly Of The Opinion That The Macintosh Is Catholic And That Dos Is Protestant. Indeed, The Macintosh Is Counterreformist And Has Been Influenced By The Methodical Path Of The Jesuits.... It Is Catechistic: The Essence Of Revelation Is Dealt With Via Simple Formulae And Sumptuous Icons. Everyone Has A Right To Salvation. Dos Is Protestant, Or Even Calvinistic. It Allows Free Interpretation Of Scripture, Demands Difficult Personal Decisions, Imposes A Subtle Hermeneutics Upon The User, And Takes For Granted The Idea That All Can Reach Salvation.

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.

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

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.

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

But Why Do Some People Support [the Heretics]?" "because It Serves Their Purposes, Which Concern The Faith Rarely, And More Often The Conquest Of Power." "is That Why The Church Of Rome Accuses All Its Adversaries Of Heresy?" "that Is Why, And That Is Also Why It Recognizes As Orthodoxy Any Heresy It Can Bring Back Under Its Own Control Or Must Accept Because The Heresy Has Become Too Strong.

For, I Must Tell You, In This World Where Today All Lose Their Minds Over Many & Wondrous Machines - Some Of Which, Alas, You Can See Also In This Siege - I Construct Aristotelian Machines, That Allow Anyone To See With Words.

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

The Enlightenment, The Age Of Reason, Is Seen As The Beginning Of Modern Depravity.

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

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.

You’ll Come Back To Me . . . It’s Written In The Stars, You See, You’ll Come Back. You’ll Come Back, It’s A Fact That I Am Strong Because I Do Believe In You.

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.

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

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

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.

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 Hand Of God Creates; It Does Not Conceal.

You Must Overcome Any Shyness And Have A Conversation With The Librarian, Because He Can Offer You Reliable Advice That Will Save You Much Time. You Must Consider That The Librarian (if Not Overworked Or Neurotic) Is Happy When He Can Demonstrate Two Things: The Quality Of His Memory And Erudition And The Richness Of His Library, Especially If It Is Small. The More Isolated And Disregarded The Library, The More The Librarian Is Consumed With Sorrow For Its Underestimation. A Person Who Asks For Help Makes The Librarian Happy.

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

What Is Life If Not The Shadow Of A Fleeting Dream?

Usually Naive Interviewers Hover Between Two Mutually Contradictory Convictions: One, That A Text We Call Creative Develops Almost Instantaneously In The Mystic Heat Of Inspirational Raptus; Or The Other, That The Writer Has Followed A Recipe, A Kind Of Secret Set Of Rules That They Would Like To See Revealed. There Is No Set Of Rules, Or, Rather, There Are Many, Varied And Flexible Rules.

A Sure Sign Of A Lunatic Is That Sooner Or Later, He Brings Up The Templars.

Sooner Or Later

To Survive, You Must Tell Stories.

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

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

Translation Is The Art Of Failure.

I Returned To The Courtyard And Saw That The Sun Had Grown Weaker. Beautiful And Clear As It Had Been, The Morning (as The Day Approached The Completion Of Its First Half) Was Becoming Damp And Misty. Heavy Clouds Moved From The North And Were Invading The Top Of The Mountain, Covering It With A Light Brume. It Seemed To Be Fog, And Perhaps Fog Was Also Rising From The Ground, But At That Altitude It Was Difficult To Distinguish The Mists That Rose From Below And Those That Come Down From Above. It Was Becoming Hard To Discern The Bulk Of The More Distant Buildings.

I Lacked The Courage To Investigate The Weaknesses Of The Wicked, Because I Discovered They Are The Same As The Weaknesses Of The Saintly.

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.

The Real Hero Is Always A Hero By Mistake.

In The Construction Of Immortal Fame You Need First Of All A Cosmic Shamelessness.

[i Am Fascinated By Stupidity] Because Normal Intelligence Is Boring. Two Plus Two Makes Four - Finished. You Have No Possibilities! Stupidity Is Infinite. Two Plus Two Can Make Billions Of Different Numbers.

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

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.

There Are Two Kinds Of Friendship: One Is Genuine Affection, The Other Is Inability To Refuse.

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

...we Can Only Add To The World, Where We Believe It Ends, More Parts Similar To Those We Already Know (an Expanse Made Again And Always Of Water And Land, Stars And Skies).

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.

The United States Needed A Civil War To Unite Properly.

I Have Lost The Freedom Of Not Having An Opinion.

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

My Father Was An Accountant And His Father Was A Typographer.

What Is Love? There Is Nothing In The World, Neither Man Nor Devil Nor Any Thing, That I Hold As Suspect As Love, For It Penetrates The Soul More Than Any Other Thing. Nothing Exists That So Fills And Binds The Heart As Love Does. Therefore, Unless You Have Those Weapons That Subdue It, The Soul Plunges Through Love Into An Immense Abyss.

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

Books Are Not Made To Be Believed, But To Be Subjected To Inquiry.

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

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.

I Felt No Passion, No Jealousy, No Nostalgia. I Was Hollow, Clear-headed, Clean, And As Emotionless As An Aluminum Pot.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

For Mallarmé Naming An Object Meant Suppressing Three-quarters Of Its Poetic Pleasure (which Consists In The Joy Of Guessing Bit By Bit - "le Suggérer, Voilà Le Rêve!").

I Was A Fervent Catholic, And I Belonged To The National Organizations, Even Becoming One Of The National Leaders, Until The Age Of 21, 22.

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.

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.

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

Conspiracies And All The Theories Of Conspiracy Are A Part Of The Canon Of Fakes. And I'm Involved, In All Of My Writings, The Theoretical Ones As Well As The Novels, With The Production Of Fakes.

There Are More Books In The World Than Hours In Which To Read Them. We Are Thus Deeply Influenced By Books We Haven't Read, That We Haven't Had The Time To Read.

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.

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

In The Middle Ages, Cathendrals And Convents Burned Like Tinder; Imagining A Medieval Story Without A Fire Is Like Imagining A World War Ii Movie In The Pacific Without A Fighter Plane Shot Down In Flames.

Not Long Ago, If You Wanted To Seize Political Power In A Country You Had Merely To Control The Army And The Police. Today It Is Only In The Most Backward Countries That Fascist Generals, In Carrying Out A Coup D'état, Still Use Tanks. If A Country Has Reached A High Degree Of Industrialization The Whole Scene Changes.... Today A Country Belongs To The Person Who Controls Communications.

Writing Doesn't Mean Necessarily Putting Words On A Sheet Of Paper. You Can Write A Chapter While Walking Or Eating.

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.

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.

I Seal That Which Was Not To Be Said In The Tomb That I Become.

Sometimes My Characters Are Not Myself.

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.

We Stopped To Browse In The Cases, And Now That William - With His New Glasses On His Nose - Could Linger And Read The Books, At Every Title He Discovered He Let Out Exclamations Of Happiness, Either Because He Knew The Work, Or Because He Had Been Seeking It For A Long Time, Or Finally Because He Had Never Heard It Mentioned And Was Highly Excited And Titillated. In Short, For Him Every Book Was Like A Fabulous Animal That He Was Meeting In A Strange Land.

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.

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

That Is A Real Attitude - To See Everything As Being Meaningful, Even The Less Important Things, To Prove Something, Even The Greater Problems Of Life.

We Are Always Remaking History. Our Memory Is Always An Interpretive Reconstruction Of The Past, So Is Perspective.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They Say That A Cat, If It Falls From A Window And Hits Its Nose, Can Lose Its Sense Of Smell And Then, Because Cats Live By Their Ability To Smell, It Can No Longer Recognize Things. I'm A Cat That Hit Its Nose.

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.

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.

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.

Then Why Do You Want To Know?" "because Learning Does Not Consist Only Of Knowing What We Must Or We Can Do, But Also Of Knowing What We Could Do And Perhaps Should Not Do.

I Have Always Been Fascinated By Paranoid People Imagining Conspiracies. I Am Fascinated By This In A Critical Way.

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

We Are Formed By Little Scraps Of Wisdom.

Love Flourishes In Expectation. Expectation Strolls Through The Spacious Fields Of Time Towards Opportunity.

The Pleasures Of Love Are Pains That Become Desirable, Where Sweetness And Torment Blend, And So Love Is Voluntary Insanity, Infernal Paradise, And Celestial Hell - In Short, Harmony Of Opposite Yearnings, Sorrowful Laughter, Soft Diamond.

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.

To Play The Trumpet, You Must Train Your Lips For A Long Time. When I Was Twelve Or Thirteen I Was A Good Player, But I Lost The Skill And Now I Play Very Badly. I Do It Every Day Even So. The Reason Is That I Want To Return To My Childhood. For Me, The Trumpet Is Evidence Of The Sort Of Young Man I Was.

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

There Are Magic Moments, Involving Great Physical Fatigue And Intense Motor Excitement, That Produce Visions Of People Known In The Past. As I Learned Later From The Delightful Little Book Of The Abbé De Bucquoy, There Are Also Visions Of Books As Yet Unwritten.

I've Always Said That I Learned The English I Know Through Two Sources -- Marvel Comics And Finnegans Wake.

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

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.

If You Want To Become A Man Of Letters And Perhaps Write Some Histories One Day, You Must Also Lie And Invent Tales, Otherwise Your History Would Become Monotonous. But You Must Act With Restraint. The World Condemns Liars Who Do Nothing But Lie, Even About The Most Trivial Things, And It Rewards Poets, Who Lie Only About The Greatest Things.

What Does Culture Want? To Make Infinity Comprehensible.

Not Bad, Not Bad At All," Diotallevi Said. "to Arrive At The Truth Through The Painstaking Reconstruction Of A False Text.

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

A Book Is A Fragile Creature, It Suffers The Wear Of Time, It Fears Rodents, The Elements And Clumsy Hands. So The Librarian Protects The Books Not Only Against Mankind But Also Against Nature And Devotes His Life To This War With The Forces Of Oblivion.

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