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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.

-Umberto Eco

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If Bush Had Read

Umberto Eco

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

I Felt Like Poisoning A Monk.

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 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.

Poetry Is Not A Matter Of Feelings, It Is A Matter Of Language. It Is Language Which Creates Feelings.

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

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.

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 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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

It Comes Down To A Question Of Attention: It's Difficult To Use The Net Distractedly, Unlike The Television Or The Radio.

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.

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.

I Love The Smell Of Book Ink In The Morning.

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.

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.

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

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.

I Don't Want To Write A Novel Per Year. I Know That I Need A Break Of One Or Two Years. So Maybe I Invent Some New, Urgent Activity So I Don't Fall Into The Trap Of Starting A New Novel.

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.

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

Sometimes My Characters Are Not Myself.

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.

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

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.

It Is Sometimes Hard To Grasp The Difference Between Identifying With One's Own Roots, Understanding People With Other Roots, And Judging What Is Good Or Bad.

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

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).

We Like Lists Because We Don't Want To Die.

[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.

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.

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

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

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

...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).

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.

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.

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

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.

A Novel Is A Machine For Generating Interpretations.

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.

Never Affirm, Always Allude: Allusions Are Made To Test The Spirit And Probe The Heart.

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?

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 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.

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!").

Perhaps I Am Not As Wise As I Like To Think I Am.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I Am Not On Facebook And On Twitter Because The Purpose Of My Life Is To Avoid Messages. I Receive Too Many Messages From The World, And So I Try To Avoid That.

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

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.

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.

I Feel That I Am A Scholar Who Only With The Left Hand Writes Novels.

Once Upon A Time There Were Mass Media, And They Were Wicked, Of Course, And There Was A Guilty Party. Then There Were The Virtuous Voices That Accused The Criminals. And Art (ah, What Luck!) Offered Alternatives, For Those Who Were Not Prisoners To The Mass Media.

A Secret Is Powerful When It Is Empty.

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

We Live For Books.

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.

To Survive, You Must Tell Stories.

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.

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

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

Freedom Of Speech

Every Great Thinker Is Someone Else's Moron.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Sooner Or Later

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.

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

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

Jacopo Belbo Didnt Understand That He Had Had His Moment And That It Would Have To Be Enough For Him, For All His Life. Not Recognizing It, He Spent The Rest Of His Days Seeking Something Else, Until He Damned Himself.

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

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.

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

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 Believe That You Can Reach The Point Where There Is No Longer Any Difference Between Developing The Habit Of Pretending To Believe And Developing The Habit Of Believing.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Every Time That I Write A Novel I Am Convinced For At Least Two Years That It Is The Last One, Because A Novel Is Like A Child. It Takes Two Years After Its Birth. You Have To Take Care Of It. It Starts Walking, And Then Speaking.

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

Originality And Creativity Are Nothing But The Result Of The Wise Management Of Combinations. The Creative Genius Combines More Rapidly, And With A Greater Critical Sense Of What Gets Tossed Out And What Gets Saved, The Same Material That The Failed Genius Has To Work With.

My Poetry Had The Same Functional Origin And The Same Formal Configuration As Teenage Acne.

Memory Is A Stopgap For Humans, For Whom Time Flies And What Is Passed Is Passed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I Wrote A Novel Because I Had A Yen To Do It. I Believe This Is Sufficient Reason To Set Out To Tell A Story.

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.

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.

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

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.

It Is Obvious That The Newspaper Produces The Opinion Of The Readers.

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.

The Truth Is An Anagram Of An Anagram.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

What Did I Really Think Fifteen Years Ago? A Nonbeliever, I Felt Guilty In The Midst Of All Those Believers. And Since It Seemed To Me That They Were In The Right, I Decided To Believe, As You Might Decide To Take An Aspirin: It Can't Hurt And You Might Get Better.

I Think Of Myself As A Serious Professor Who, During The Weekend, Writes Novels.

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

Simple Mechanisms Do Not Love.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

But Laughter Is Weakness, Corruption, The Foolishness Of Our Flesh.

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.

I Am A Professor Who Writes Novels On Sundays

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 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.

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

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.

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

Creativity Can Only Be Anarchic, Capitalist, Darwinian.

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.

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

I Enjoyed Your Article, But I Preferred My Own.

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

I Have To Admit That I Only Read War And Peace When I Was 40. But I Knew The Basics Before Then.

We Are Never Racist Against Somebody Who Is Very Far Away. I Don't Know Any Racism Against The Eskimos. To Have A Racist Feeling, There Must Be An Other Who Is Slightly Different From Us - But Is Living Close To Us.

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

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.

How Beautiful Was The Spectacle Of Nature Not Yet Touched By The Often Perverse Wisdom Of Man!

The Hand Of God Creates; It Does Not Conceal.

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.

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.

[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.

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

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

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.

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.

We Invented The Car, And It Made It Easier For Us To Crash And Die. If I Gave A Car To My Grandfather, He Would Die In Five Minutes, While I Have Grown Up Slowly To Accept Speed.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Again And Again

"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.

The Art Of Splitting Hairs Four Ways. This Is The Department Of Useless Techniques. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, For Example, Is How To Build Machines For Greeting Uncles. We're Not Sure, Though, If Pylocatabasis Belongs, Since It's The Art Of Being Saved By A Hair. Somehow That Doesn't Seem Completely Useless.

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

I Consider Always The Adult Life To Be The Continuous Retrieval Of Childhood.

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

The Only Truth Lies In Learning To Free Ourselves From Insane Passion For The Truth.

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.

A Human Best, Which Is Very Little. Its Hard To Accept The Idea That There Cannot Be An Order In The Universe Because It Would Offend The Free Will Of God And His Omnipotence. So The Freedom Of God Is Our Condemnation, Or At Least The Condemnation Of Our Pride.

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.

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

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

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.

The Poets Did Not Win; The Philosophers Surrendered.

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.

Love Is Wiser Than Wisdom.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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