Umberto Eco Quotes

Sometimes with good writers you don't spot the theme, but when you come away you realise there has been one.

To read between the lines was easier than to follow the text.

I'm of the Samuel Goldwyn school of writing: If you need to send a message, call Western Union. Any messages people take away from my books are the ones they see in them.

I'm incapable of writing without social commentary. I like to think that it's integrated and not really heavy handedly didactic.

The ideal, it seems to me, is to show things happening and allow the reader to decide what they mean.

I don't like to make strong statements. I want to write strong novels... I keep my deep, radical things for my novels.

What isn't said is as important as what is said.

If I asked for a cup of coffee, someone would search for the double meaning.

Where more is meant than meets the ear.

I'm obsessed with subtexts. I love that we often don't say what we feel. That gap between the two. I like it when actors reveal a lot without having to say it.

You don't want to hit readers over the head like they're completely incapable of picking up on subtlety.

I don't necessarily set out to teach or say anything in particular in my writing. Morals and themes come out as I'm telling the tale.

It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

We were in dialogue that was about something other than what we were saying.

Cinema through spectacle, through the entertainment of spectacle, tells the story of many actual problems in life. Because who ever doesn't want to read between the lines can just enjoy the entertainment and the show and can go home happy.

I don't think there is a single sentence in this whole book [East of Eden] that does not either develop character, carry on the story or provide necessary background.

Don't tell readers what to think. Let the action speak for itself.

There are more truths in a good book than its author meant to put in it.

Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.

Behind the story I tell is the one I don't...Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.

A book consists of two layers: on top, the readable layer ... and underneath, a layer that was inaccessible. You only sense its existence in a moment of distraction from the literal reading, the way you see childhood through a child. It would take forever to tell what you see, and it would be pointless.

It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us.

We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of "sense" of what is going on. This "sense" is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly, that is too much to expect, but of having read them, of having "completed" them.

Great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors.

As a digital creator, there's been so much pressure to write a book because so many of my peers have done it. I've been very adamant about saying, "No! I don't want to release a book just for the sake of writing a book. I'm going to write a book when I feel like I have something to say in a book."