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Beauty is boring because it is predictable.
Umberto Eco
The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar 'queen', alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.
How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn't have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see.
We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.
Our most noted satirists are true columnists, and their opinions can be worth more than any well-documented expose.
Libraries can take the place of God.
I write what I write.
The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.
One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.
A transposable aphorism is a malaise of the urge to be witty, or in other words, a maxim that is untroubled by the fact that the opposite of what it says is equally true so long as it appears to be funny.
I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare's tragedies.
Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.
History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.
It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.
Today, political events are nullified unless they're on TV.
Religion has nothing to do with God. It's a fundamental attitude of human beings, who ask about the origins of life and what happens after death. For many, the answer is a personal god. In my opinion, it's religion that produces God, not the other way round.
We like lists because we don't want to die.
You die, but most of what you have accumulated will not be lost; you are leaving a message in a bottle.
Sometimes you say things with a smile with the precise intention of making it clear that you are not being serious, and are only kidding. If I salute a friend with a smile and say, 'How are you, you old scoundrel!' clearly I don't really mean he's a scoundrel.
Berlusconi is a genius in communication. Otherwise, he would never have become so rich.
But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.
As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
My grandfather had a particularly important influence on my life, even though I didn't visit him often, since he lived about three miles out of town and he died when I was six. He was remarkably curious about the world, and he read lots of books.
What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.
Dan Brown is a character from 'Foucault's Pendulum!' I invented him. He shares my characters' fascinations - the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.
The grandeur of Jerusalem is also... its problem.
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 only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.
Media populism means appealing to people directly through media. A politician who can master the media can shape political affairs outside of parliament and even eliminate the mediation of parliament.
Conspiracies do exist. Probably in this moment in New York there is an economic group making a conspiracy in order to buy three banks. But if they succeed, they are immediately discovered.
Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.
When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.
When someone has to intervene to defend the liberty of the press, that society is sick.
To read a paper book is another experience: you can do it on a ship, on the branch of a tree, on your bed, even if there is a blackout.
Political satire is a serious thing. In democratic newspapers throughout the world there are daily cartoons that often are not even funny, as is the case especially in many English-language newspapers. Instead, they contain a political message, and the artist takes full responsibility.
There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.
Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious.
All the religious wars that have caused blood to be shed for centuries arise from passionate feelings and facile counter-positions, such as Us and Them, good and bad, white and black.
When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.
I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.
When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.
After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs.
Our life is full of empty space.
The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?
It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with one's own roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad.
I have to admit that I only read 'War and Peace' when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.
We are never racist against somebody who is very far away. I don't know any racism against the Eskimos. To have a racist feeling, there must be an other who is slightly different from us - but is living close to us.
There are books on our shelves we haven't read and doubtless never will, that each of us has probably put to one side in the belief that we will read them later on, perhaps even in another life.
Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.
Certainly, light fiction exists and encompasses mysteries or second-class romance novels, books that are read on the beach, whose only aim is to entertain. These books are not concerned with style or creativity - instead they are successful because they are repetitive and follow a template that readers enjoy.
Because of lies, we can produce and invent a possible world.
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