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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?

-Umberto Eco

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On Sober Reflection, I

Umberto Eco

...

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?

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The United States Needed A Civil War To Unite Properly.

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

"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 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.

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

Telling The Truth

...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).

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.

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

There Are No Stories Without Meaning. And I Am One Of Those Men Who Can Find It Even When Others Fail To See It. Afterwards The Story Becomes The Book Of The Living, Like A Blaring Trumpet That Raises From The Tomb Those Who Have Been Dust For Centuries.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 Formed By Little Scraps Of Wisdom.

[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.

"you Cannot Believe What You Are Saying." "well, No. Hardly Ever. But The Philosopher Is Like The Poet. The Latter Composes Ideal Letters For An Ideal Nymph, Only To Plumb With His Words The Depths Of Passion. The Philosopher Tests The Coldness Of His Gaze, To See How Far He Can Undermine The Fortress Of Bigotry."

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.

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

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.

The Internet Gives Us Everything And Forces Us To Filter It Not By The Workings Of Culture, But With Our Own Brains. This Risks Creating Six Billion Separate Encyclopedias, Which Would Prevent Any Common Understanding Whatsoever.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Love Is Wiser Than Wisdom.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Libraries Can Take The Place Of God.

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

What Does Culture Want? To Make Infinity Comprehensible.

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

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.

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.

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

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

The Cultivated Person's First Duty Is To Be Always Prepared To Rewrite The Encyclopedia.

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

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

One Can Be A Great Poet And Be Politically Stupid.

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

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.

It Takes A Little Time, But The Pleasures Of Cooking Begin Before The Pleasures Of The Palate, And Preparing Means Anticipating.

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.

And We, Inhabitants Of The Great Coral Of The Cosmos, Believe The Atom (which Still We Cannot See) To Be Full Matter, Whereas, It Too, Like Everything Else, Is But An Embroidery Of Voids In The Void, And We Give The Name Of Being, Dense And Even Eternal, To That Dance Of Inconsistencies, That Infinite Extension That Is Identified With Absolute Nothingness And That Spins From Its Own Non-being The Illusion Of Everything.

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.

The Truth Is An Anagram Of An Anagram.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We Live For Books. A Sweet Mission In This World Dominated By Disorder And Decay.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I Felt Like Poisoning A Monk.

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.

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

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

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.

The Light In Her Eyes Was Beyond Description, Yet It Did Not Instill Improper Thoughts: It Inspired A Love Tempered By Awe, Purifying The Hearts It Inflamed.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

All The Stories I Would Like To Write Persecute Me. When I Am In My Chamber, It Seems As If They Are All Around Me, Like Little Devils, And While One Tugs At My Ear, Another Tweaks My Nose, And Each Says To Me, 'sir, Write Me, I Am Beautiful.

The French, The Italians, The Germans, The Spanish And The English Have Spent Centuries Killing Each Other.

Killing Each Other

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.

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.

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.

Simple Mechanisms Do Not Love.

There, Master Niketas,’ Baudolino Said, ‘when I Was Not Prey To The Temptations Of This World, I Devoted My Nights To Imagining Other Worlds. A Bit With The Help Of Wine, And A Bit With That Of The Green Honey. There Is Nothing Better Than Imagining Other Worlds,’ He Said, ‘to Forget The Painful One We Live In. At Least So I Thought Then. I Hadn’t Yet Realized That, Imagining Other Worlds, You End Up Changing This One.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The Problem With The Internet Is That It Gives You Everything - Reliable Material And Crazy Material. So The Problem Becomes, How Do You Discriminate?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Again And Again

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.

To Establish What Is True Is Very Difficult. Frequently It Is Easier To Establish What Is False. And, Passing Through The False, It's Possible To Understand Something About Truth.

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

Where Else? I Belong To A Lost Generation And Am Comfortable Only In The Company Of Others Who Are Lost And Lonely.

American Coffee Can Be A Pale Solution Served At A Temperature Of 100oc

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

Beauty Is Boring Because It Is Predictable.

Books Always Speak Of Other Books.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I Enjoyed Your Article, But I Preferred My Own.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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).

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

Once You Reach Your Fifties, You Have To Stop Being Interested In The Present And Write Only On Elizabethan Poets.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

A Secret Is Powerful When It Is Empty.

Only An Unhinged Movie Survives As A Disconnected Series Of Images, Of Peaks, Of Visual Icebergs. It Should Display Not One Central Idea But Many. It Should Not Reveal A Coherent Philosophy Of Composition. It Must Live On, And Because Of, Its Glorious Ricketiness.

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

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.

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

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

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

Freedom Of Speech

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.

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

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

I Am A Professor Who Writes Novels On Sundays

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

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.

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.

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."

I Love The Smell Of Book Ink In The Morning.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

If Somebody Writes A Book And Doesn't Care For The Survival Of That Book, He's An Imbecile.

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.

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

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Robertson Davies

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