Umberto Eco Quotes

I developed a prejudice in high school that it was all going to be boring. That kind of teenage, why-do-I-have-to-read-these-goddamn-classics feeling. And then you discover that the classics are classics because they're lively. They don't stick around because they're boring. If they're boring, they go away.

Sometimes novels are considered 'important' in the way medicine is - they taste terrible and are difficult to get down your throat, but are good for you.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

We take literature too seriously.

Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.

A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

When I go on vacation, I take very few clothes and a whole lot of books. It's the most soothing thing in the world. Reading 'Moby-Dick' is like being in a time machine. I almost feel as excited as the first time I read it and I always find something new.

Hemingway's remarks are not literature.

It's absolutely philistine not to recognize what a great book 'An American Dream' is. Norman Mailer is his own worst enemy, and if you don't catch him in a defensive position, he'll admit it. I'd really like to help that man.

I don't think you can ever be ahead of your time with cynicism about that subject. No, I don't think it was ahead of its time. I think it was very much a product of its time.

I honestly don't think Peter is that interesting without Harriet - the only exception being 'The Nine Tailors', which is such a good book it doesn't really matter whether he's got a consort or not.

I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously.

Only in the most unusual cases is it useful to determine whether a book is good or bad; for it is just as rare for it to be one or the other. It is usually both.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

And who cares, five years down the road, what most movies made or didn't make? If it's good, it stands up.

What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

I just hope that some of the movies I'm in are still welcome years from now.

If people aren't creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

Those who do not read criticism will rarely merit to be criticised.

I believe one can gauge a book's impact only after about 10 years.