Umberto Eco

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.

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.

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.

After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs.

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.

With all of its defects, the global market makes war less likely, even between the USA and China.

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.

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

The French, the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish and the English have spent centuries killing each other.

Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.

Libraries can take the place of God.

I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.

I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.

Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.

Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.

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.

Creativity can only be anarchic, capitalist, Darwinian.

People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

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 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).