Umberto Eco Quotes

In one sentence, I'd describe myself as indescribable. But, I wouldn't end it with a period. I'd end it with three dots.

I never think that a film should answer questions for you. I think it should make you ask a lot of questions.

I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.

Shakespeare pulls on us and demands the best of us. You never successfully wrestle one of his plays to the ground and say, 'See? That's It!'

There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.

Movies work, in my opinion, on the best level when they're more enigmatic, when we don't say it's this or that and where it raises more questions than answers.

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity... but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

Life is like that. We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know.

Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear

It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.

We are living in complex, difficult times and I wanted Syriana to reflect this complexity in a visceral way, to embrace it narratively. There are no good guys and no bad guys and there are no easy answers. The characters do not have traditional character arcs; the stories don't wrap up in neat little life lessons, the questions remain open. The hope was that by not wrapping everything up, the film will get under your skin in a different way and stay with you longer. This seemed like the most honest reflection of this post 9-11 world we all find ourselves in.

As the work progresses the careful reader will insert mental interrogation points here and there. He will find that his interest increases as the interrogation points become more frequent, and that it culminates where they are changed to marks of positive dissent. I venture to record the opinion that the value of the work reaches a maximum in a passage that is demonstrably incorrect.

Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't.

He's very nice. He's something I replied. She considered this zipping her purse shut. Then she said Well everyone is. Everyone is Something. For some reason that stuck with me simple and yet not every since she'd said it. It was like a puzzle as well two vague words with one clear one between them.

I like to end stories where the readers have a little room to run. They can resolve things as they like in their own mind.

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end. The best you can do is admire the cat's cradle, and maybe knot it up a bit more.

What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.

The better you hear a thing put, the more certain you are there's another view.

Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words. Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord? Hamlet: Between who? Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.

Nothing is black or white.

But there was more to it than that. As the Amazing Maurice said, it was just a story about people and rats. And the difficult part of it was deciding who the people were, and who were the rats.

I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point! What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.

That's what I love about poetry. The more abstract, the better. The stuff where you're not sure what the poet's talking about. You may have an idea, but you can't be sure. Not a hundred percent. Each word, specifically chosen, could have a million different meanings.

For nothing was simply one thing.