Umberto Eco Quotes

I spend about a year between novels.

I've always wanted to have a book published - it was a dream of mine, but the thought of actually writing a book made me feel really sick.

When I was writing 'The Windup Girl' and 'Ship Breaker,' I was writing those simultaneously, so I was an unpublished writer, not really having that full sense that these books would go out in the world, that they would be successful, that there would be an audience and that there would be fans of those stories.

I'd never written a novel before, and I wrote a novel, and that turned out OK.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.

When I wrote The Onion Field, I realized that my first two novels were just practice.

I dreamt of being a writer once I started to read. I started to write 'Bonjour Tristesse' in bistros around the Sorbonne. I finished it, I sent it to editors. It was accepted.

I have a really good idea for a novel and would like to just kind of try my hand at fiction. I'm starting to kind of get a really good body of work going from a literary standpoint. As long as the audience is there, man, I'll keep cranking them out.

I had a few stories and longer pieces published, but my first proper novel came in 2003, called 'Dead I Well May Be.'

Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.

Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark... your words come out, and then nothing... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.

What I wanted in life always was to write something as good as 'Pinocchio.' I wanted to write. I wanted to evolve. I wanted to grow.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

I keep telling myself I should try very hard to write a novel of about 210 pages... I don't seem to be capable of it, but I keep hoping it will happen.

Over a four-month period, I sat down and wrote every day. And then there was a novel, and all of a sudden, there were agents and offers.

I really absolutely loved writing my first book.

When I started, I was pretty sure I was going to be writing some goofy little wizard novels that might make me some part-time money and would hopefully lead to something I could do better.

The best novel I wrote was one called 'Crusoe's Daughter,' which never won any prizes. But I was getting somewhere in that. I'm not sure I have in any of the others.

Today I began the novel that I determined to be great.

My first published book, 'Story of a Girl', was the fourth book I wrote.

My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.

I wrote my first novel, 'Deadline,' in 1994 as an experiment.

I've seen people around me write books, and somehow they're always in the center of everything that happened; they were the one who made it happen. There's been a lot of those books that didn't really interest me much.