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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.

-Umberto Eco

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When The Writer (or

Umberto Eco

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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.

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Love Is Wiser Than Wisdom.

I Felt Like Poisoning A Monk.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

We Live For Books.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

"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.

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

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.

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

The Poets Did Not Win; The Philosophers Surrendered.

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

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.

Dan Brown, Is A Character From Foucault's Pendulum! I Invented Him. He Shares My Characters' Fascinations - The World Conspiracy Of Rosicrucians, Masons, And Jesuits. The Role Of The Knights Templar. The Hermetic Secret. The Principle That Everything Is Connected. I Suspect Dan Brown Might Not Even Exist.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

What Does Culture Want? To Make Infinity Comprehensible.

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

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

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.

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.

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 Enjoyed Your Article, But I Preferred My Own.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Religion Has Nothing To Do With God. It's A Fundamental Attitude Of Human Beings, Who Ask About The Origins Of Life And What Happens After Death. For Many, The Answer Is A Personal God. In My Opinion, It's Religion That Produces God, Not The Other Way Round.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

You Cannot Escape One Infinite, I Told Myself, By Fleeing To Another. You Cannot Escape The Revelation Of The Identical By Taking Refuge In The Illusion Of The Multiple.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The Good Of A Book Lies In Its Being Read.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

I Am A Professor Who Writes Novels On Sundays

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

Until Then I Had Thought Each Book Spoke Of The Things, Human Or Divine, That Lie Outside Books. Now I Realized That Not Infrequently Books Speak Of Books: It Is As If They Spoke Among Themselves. In The Light Of This Reflection, The Library Seemed All The More Disturbing To Me. It Was Then The Place Of A Long, Centuries-old Murmuring, An Imperceptible Dialogue Between One Parchment And Another, A Living Thing, A Receptacle Of Powers Not To Be Ruled By A Human Mind, A Treausre Of Secrets Emanated By Many Minds, Surviving The Death Of Those Who Had Produced Them Or Had Been Their Conveyors.

The Truth Is An Anagram Of An Anagram.

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

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

Simple Mechanisms Do Not Love.

Libraries Can Take The Place Of God.

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.

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

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

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

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

In Other Words, Although I Don't Like Them, We Do Need Noble-spirited Souls.

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 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.

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

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.

A Novel Is A Machine For Generating Interpretations.

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

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

If Culture Did Not Filter, It Would Be Inane - As Inane As The Formless, Boundless Internet Is On Its Own. And If We All Possessed The Boundless Knowledge Of The Web, We Would Be Idiots! Culture Is An Instrument For Making A Hierarchical System Of Intellectual Labor.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

...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).

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.

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

Beauty Is Boring Because It Is Predictable.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

The Monkish Vows Keep Us Far From That Sink Of Vice That Is The Female Body, But Often They Bring Us Close To Other Errors. Can I Finally Hide From Myself The Fact That Even Today My Old Age Is Still Stirred By The Noonday Demon When My Eyes, In Choir, Happen To Linger On The Beardless Face Of A Novice, Pure And Fresh As A Maidens?

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

Living The Same Sorrows Three Times Was A Suffering, But It Was A Suffering To Relive Even The Same Joys. The Joy Of Life Is Born From Feeling, Whether It Be Joy Or Grief, Always Of Short Duration, And Woe To Those Who Know They Will Enjoy Eternal Bliss.

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

[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.

A Secret Is Powerful When It Is Empty.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I Write What I Write.

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.

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

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.

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.

We Are Formed By Little Scraps Of Wisdom.

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

Killing Each Other

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Translation Is The Art Of Failure.

Books Always Speak Of Other Books.

Every Great Thinker Is Someone Else's Moron.

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

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.

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 Hand Of God Creates; It Does Not Conceal.

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

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.

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.

To Survive, You Must Tell Stories.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Again And Again

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 Followers Must Feel Besieged.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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?

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