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

-Umberto Eco

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Stopgaps Do Belong To

Umberto Eco

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 Were Clever Enough To Turn A Laundry List Into Poetry.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I Enjoyed Your Article, But I Preferred My Own.

I Write What I Write.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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

A 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.

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

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.

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

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

I 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

"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."

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 Good Of A Book Lies In Its Being Read.

One Can Be A Great Poet And Be Politically Stupid.

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

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

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.

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.

The Real Hero Is Always A Hero By Mistake.

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

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

"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.

I Love The Smell Of Book Ink In The Morning.

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

Again And Again

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

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

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

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

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

The West Has Decided To Channel Money And Effort Into Studying Other Customs And Practices, But No One Has Really Given Other People The Chance To Study Western Customs And Practices, Except At Schools Maintained By White Expatriates, Or By Allowing The Rich From Other Cultures To Study In Oxford Or Paris. What Happens Then Is That They Return Home To Organise Fundamentalist Movements, Because They Feel Solidarity With Those Of Their Compatriots Who Lack The Opportunity For Such Education.

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

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

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

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

Creativity Can Only Be Anarchic, Capitalist, Darwinian.

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

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

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.

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?

The United States Needed A Civil War To Unite Properly.

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.

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

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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.

There Is A Constant In The Average American Imagination And Taste, For Which The Past Must Be Preserved And Celebrated In Full-scale Authentic Copy; A Philosophy Of Immortality As Duplication. It Dominates The Relation With The Self, With The Past, Not Infrequently With The Present, Always With History And, Even, With The European Tradition.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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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.

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.

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

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.

To Imagine Secret Societies And Conspiracy Is A Way Not To React To The Social And Political Life. Because You Say, "we Don't Know Who They Are. We Cannot React Without Reasoning." So It Is A Way To Keep People Far From The Political Environment.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Freedom Of Speech

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

I Could Work In The Shower If I Had Plastic Paper.

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?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I Have Lost The Freedom Of Not Having An Opinion.

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

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.

Entering A Novel Is Like Going On A Climb In The Mountains: You Have To Learn The Rhythms Of Respiration - Acquire The Pace. Otherwise You Stop Right Away.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Simple Mechanisms Do Not Love.

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

[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.

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.

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.

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

Telling The Truth

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

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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 Live For Books.

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

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.

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

I Believe All Sin, Love, Glory Are This: When You Slide Down The Knotted Sheets, Escaping From Gestapo Headquarters, And She Hugs You, There, Suspended, And She Whispers That She's Always Dreamed Of You. The Rest Is Just Sex, Copulation, The Perpetuation Of The Vile Species.

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.

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

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.

A Novel Is A Machine For Generating Interpretations.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

What Does Culture Want? To Make Infinity Comprehensible.

Translation Is The Art Of Failure.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I Should Be At Peace. I Have Understood. Don't Some Say That Peace Comes When You Understand? I Have Understood. I Should Be At Peace. Who Said That Peace Derives From The Contemplation Of Order, Order Understood, Enjoyed, Realized Without Residuum, In Joy And Truimph, The End Of Effort? All Is Clear, Limpid; The Eye Rests On The Whole And On The Parts And Sees How The Parts Have Conspired To Make The Whole; It Perceives The Center Where The Lymph Flows, The Breath, The Root Of The Whys.

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.

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

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

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

To Survive, You Must Tell Stories.

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

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.

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