Eco sees the intellectual as an organizer of culture, someone who can run a magazine or a museum. An administrator, in fact. I think this is a melancholy situation for an intellectual.

I prefer insomnia to anaesthesia.

I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.

It's the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection.

I live quietly at home among my family and friends.

But democracy isn't a state of perfection. It has to be improved, and that means constant vigilance.

People with lots of doubts sometimes find life more oppressive and exhausting than others, but they're more energetic - they aren't robots.

But I don't think I have any particular talent for prediction, because when you have three or four elements in hand, you don't have to be a genius to reach certain conclusions.

There are some fundamental values it's impossible to be wrong about.

Perfection spawns doctrines, dictators and totalitarian ideas.

I don't want to promote my own image either. I don't like going on television or mixing in literary circles.

We appreciate most that which we have lived without.

There is a road which leads to all roads. The name of that road is adventure!

Everyone believes in his youth that the world really began with him and that all merely exists for his sake.

Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.

"Criminal justice" was a term she found more apt than it was meant to be.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

I use all of my bullets and my guns like I'm supposed to use them.

He who attains his ideal, precisely thereby surpasses it.

I guess the painkillers wipe out your memory along with your ethics.

When the sun sets, life gets darker in the country; when a bad leader sinks, life gets brighter in the country!