Umberto Eco Quotes

There are two kinds of friendship: one is genuine affection, the other is inability to refuse.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

I felt no passion, no jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as emotionless as an aluminum pot.

My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.

How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by the often perverse wisdom of man!

I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.

Conspiracies and all the theories of conspiracy are a part of the canon of fakes. And I’m involved, in all of my writings, the theoretical ones as well as the novels, with the production of fakes.

Simple mechanisms do not love.

The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked.

An idea you have might not be original. But by creating a novel out of that idea you can make it original.

My poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne.

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.