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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.

-Umberto Eco

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There, Master Niketas,’ Baudolino

Umberto Eco

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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.

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

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

A Secret Is Powerful When It Is Empty.

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

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.

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

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.

Sometimes My Characters Are Not Myself.

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.

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.

Today I Realize That Many Recent Exercises In "deconstructive Reading" Read As If Inspired By My Parody. This Is Parody's Mission: It Must Never Be Afraid Of Going Too Far. If Its Aim Is True, It Simply Heralds What Others Will Later Produce, Unblushing, With Impassive And Assertive Gravity.

I 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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. . . .

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.

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

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

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.

But It Has Often Happened That I Have Found The Most Seductive Depictions Of Sin In The Pages Of Those Very Men Of Incorruptible Virtue Who Condemned Their Spell And Their Effects.

I'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.

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

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

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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.

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

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Remembers Everything

Young Generation

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

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

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I Love The Smell Of Book Ink In The Morning.

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

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

A Transposable Aphorism Is A Malaise Of The Urge To Be Witty, Or In Other Words, A Maxim That Is Untroubled By The Fact That The Opposite Of What It Says Is Equally True So Long As It Appears To Be Funny.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Monsters Exist Because They Are Part Of The Divine Plan, And In The Horrible Features Of Those Same Monsters The Power Of The Creator Is Revealed.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

They [the Templars] Had Read Avicenna, And They Were Not Ignorant, Like The Europeans. How Could You Live Alongside A Tolerant, Mystical, Libertine Culture For Two Centuries Without Succumbing To Its Allure, Particularly When You Compared It To Western Culture, Which Was Crude, Vulgar, Barbaric, And Germanic?

Western Culture

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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Black And White

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.

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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.

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

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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.

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Western Culture

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.

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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.

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

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.

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).

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

Killing Each Other

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

The Hand Of God Creates; It Does Not Conceal.

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.

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

[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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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The Real Hero Is Always A Hero By Mistake.

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

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Telling The Truth

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Simple Mechanisms Do Not Love.

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

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

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

The Followers Must Feel Besieged.

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

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

I Have Lost The Freedom Of Not Having An Opinion.

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.

"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."

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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