Eco: "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."

Eco: "I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels."

Eco: "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."

Eco: "Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame."

Eco: "The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon... The book has been thoroughly tested, and it's very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes."

Eco: "Our life is full of empty space."

Eco: "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."

Eco: "Beauty is boring because it is predictable."

Eco: "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."

Eco: "Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings."

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."

Eco: "What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible."

Eco: "I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don't tell anybody what I'm doing. I'm living in my private world. And it's a great sensation."

Eco: "I could work in the shower if I had plastic paper."