We are a pluralist civilisation because we allow mosques to be built in our countries, and we are not going to stop simply because Christian missionaries are thrown into prison in Kabul. If we did so, we, too, would become Taliban.
Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.
The most interesting letters I received about ‘The Name of the Rose’ were from people in the Midwest that maybe didn’t understand exactly, but wanted to understand more and who were excited by this picture of a world which was not their own.
How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon.
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.
Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respiration – acquire the pace. Otherwise you stop right away.
The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked.
I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.
I write what I write.
Perhaps I am not as wise as I like to think I am.
Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.
By means of the sign, man frees himself from the here and now for abstraction.
All of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real.
For the enemy to be recognized and feared, he has to be in your home or on your doorstep.
When your true enemies are too strong, you have to choose weaker enemies.
He who falls in love in bars doesn’t need a woman all his own. He can always find one on loan.
My poetry had the same functional origin and the same formal configuration as teenage acne.
A secret is powerful when it is empty. People often mention the “Masonic secret.” What on earth is the Masonic secret? No one can tell. As long as it remains empty it can be filled up with every possible notion, and it has power.
Every man is obsessed by the memories of his own youth.
There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics.