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"There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list."
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"For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose."

"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."

"At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air."

"My brain has become my enemy. We fight over creation and his need for sleep."

"I have spent a good many years since-too many, I think-being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all."

"He kept seeing the brains dribbling down the wallpaper. It wasn't the killing that stayed on his mind, it was the spilled talent. A lifetime of honing and shaping torn apart in less than a second. All those stories, all those images, and what came out looked like so much oatmeal. What was the point?"

"When you aren't satisfied with what has already been done, make something better. That is the greatest responsibility and the true freedom of creativity. The freedom is in that it doesn't need to complain."

"Fresh, solid ideas feel like gifts to writers, therefore every morning is Christmas."

"We write to shed our sorrows and give strength to our spirit."

"My pen beats faster as I write with my heart."
Explore more quotes by Umberto Eco


"Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them."


"Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth."


"I was upset. I had always believed logic was a universal weapon and now I realized how its validity depended on the way it was employed."


"If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teachthem how to use television."


"The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis."


"Because learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do."


"I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it)."


"William made an ejaculation in his own language that I didn't understand, nor did the abbot understand it, and perhaps it was best for us both, because the word William uttered had an obscene hissing sound."
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