How clear everything becomes when you look from the darkness of a dungeon. Umberto Eco More Quotes by Umberto Eco More Quotes From Umberto Eco I am not on Facebook and on Twitter because the purpose of my life is to avoid messages. I receive too many messages from the world, and so I try to avoid that. Umberto Eco purpose trying world I'm always fascinated by losers. Also, in my "Foucault's Pendulum," the main characters, who are in a way losers, they are more interesting than the winners. Umberto Eco character way interesting I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person. Umberto Eco writing character facts To imagine secret societies and conspiracy is a way not to react to the social and political life. Because you say, "We don't know who they are. We cannot react without reasoning." So it is a way to keep people far from the political environment. Umberto Eco political secret people My collection of rare books concerns only books that don't tell the truth. Umberto Eco concern telling-the-truth book A newspaper can follow the compulsions, the desires of the readers. Take the English evening newspapers - they are following the readers' desires when they are interested only in the royal family gossip. But even the most objective, serious newspaper in the world designs the way in which the reader could or should think. That's unavoidable. Umberto Eco gossip design thinking To establish what is true is very difficult. Frequently it is easier to establish what is false. And, passing through the false, it's possible to understand something about truth. Umberto Eco passing difficult easier Never let the past close your wings to fly today to your future Umberto Eco Our life is full of empty space. Umberto Eco empty-space empty space life If people buy my books for vanity, I consider it a tax on idiocy. Umberto Eco books tax vanity people You die, but most of what you have accumulated will not be lost; you are leaving a message in a bottle. Umberto Eco die will you lost But now 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. Umberto Eco mad truth believe world