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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.

-Umberto Eco

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The Print Does Not

Umberto Eco

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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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Falling In Love

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.

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.

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

Quotation Marks

I 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.

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.

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.

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

A 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 Have Come To Believe That The Whole World Is An Enigma, A Harmless Enigma That Is Made Terrible By Our Own Mad Attempt To Interpret It As Though It Had An Underlying Truth.

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

Simple Mechanisms Do Not Love.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

"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.

Every Great Thinker Is Someone Else's Moron.

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 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.

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

[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.

My Grandfather Had A Particularly Important Influence On My Life, Even Though I Didn't Visit Him Often, Since He Lived About Three Miles Out Of Town And He Died When I Was Six. He Was Remarkably Curious About The World, And He Read Lots Of Books.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I Am A Professor Who Writes Novels On Sundays

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.

I Love The Smell Of Book Ink In The Morning.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The United States Needed A Civil War To Unite Properly.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Beauty Is Boring Because It Is Predictable.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

Creativity Can Only Be Anarchic, Capitalist, Darwinian.

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.

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.

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 Write What I Write.

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.

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

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

Naturally, Everything Depends On One's Background Books And On What One Is Looking For.

What Does Culture Want? To Make Infinity Comprehensible.

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

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

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

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

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.

One Of The Problems I Have Always Discussed Is The Refusal To Distinguish Between Comment And Fact. The Newspaper Wraps Every Fact Into A Comment. It Is Impossible To Give Mere Fact Without Establishing Point Of View.

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

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

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

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.

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

Killing Each Other

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

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.

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.

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

Sooner Or Later

...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).

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!").

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.

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 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.

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.

"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."

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.

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

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 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.

All The Religious Wars That Have Caused Blood To Be Shed For Centuries Arise From Passionate Feelings And Facile Counter-positions, Such As Us And Them, Good And Bad, White And Black.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The Poets Did Not Win; The Philosophers Surrendered.

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

Telling The Truth

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 Enjoyed Your Article, But I Preferred My Own.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The Followers Must Feel Besieged.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Translation Is The Art Of Failure.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 See The Point Of Having 80 Million People Online If All They Are Doing In The End Is Talking To Ghosts In The Suburbs.

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.

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

The Truth Is An Anagram Of An Anagram.

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.

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

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.

One Can Be A Great Poet And Be Politically Stupid.

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

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

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

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.

The Postmodern Reply To The Modern Consists Of Recognizing That The Past, Since It Cannot Really Be Destroyed, Because Its Destruction Leads To Silence, Must Be Revisited: But With Irony, Not Innocently. I Think Of The Postmodern Attitude As That Of A Man Who Loves A Very Cultivated Woman And Knows He Cannot Say To Her, I Love You Madly, Because He Knows That She Knows (and That She Knows That He Knows) That These Words Have Already Been Written By Barbara Cartland. Still, There Is A Solution. He Can Say, As Barbara Cartland Would Put It, I Love You Madly.

Libraries Can Take The Place Of God.

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.

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

The Real Hero Is Always A Hero By Mistake.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Freedom Of Speech

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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