"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 be...
I love the smell of book ink in the morning.
More Umberto Eco quotes
"We live for books.
"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 becau...
"The visitor enters and says, "What a lot of books! Have you read them all?" ...The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: "And more, dea...
"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 worl...
"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 stor...
"Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right aw...
"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 on...
"There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past ("en me retra...
"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 discov...
"A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is f...
"...a book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years every...
"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 b...
"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...
"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 b...