Eco Fiction Quotes & Sayings

Men, being accustomed to act on reflection themselves, are a great deal too apt to believe that women act on reflection, too. Women do nothing of the sort. They act on impulse; and, in nine cases out of ten, they are heartily sorry for it afterward. — Wilkie Collins

To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative - the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time. — Umberto Eco

I think as you mature as an actor things open up to you in a lot of ways, especially if you do work on yourself. — John Leguizamo

It is necessary to create constraints, in order to invent freely. In poetry the constraint can be imposed by meter, foot, rhyme, by what has been called the "verse according to the ear." ... In fiction, the surrounding world provides the constraint. This has nothing to do with realism ... A completely unreal world can be constructed, in which asses fly and princesses are restored to life by a kiss; but that world, purely possible and unrealistic, must exist according to structures defined at the outset (we have to know whether it is a world where a princess can be restored to life only by the kiss of a prince, or also by that of a witch, and whether the princess's kiss transforms only frogs into princes or also, for example, armadillos). — Umberto Eco

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned. - Maya Angelou. — Jasinda Wilder

The fight will last as long as I allow it to last, and then I will knock him out. — Lennox Lewis

Any fact becomes important when it's connected to another. — Umberto Eco

Never underestimate the value of cold cash. — Gregory Nunn

Terrible drought, crops dead, sheep dying. Spring dried up. No water. The Hopi, and the Christian, maybe the Moslem, they pray for rain. The Navajo has the proper ceremony done to restore himself to harmony with the drought. You see what I mean. The system is designed to recognize what's beyond human power to change, and then to change the human's attitude to be content with the inevitable. - Tony Hillerman, Sacred Clowns, 1993 — Tony Hillerman

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. — Umberto Eco

Certainly, light fiction exists and encompasses mysteries or second-class romance novels, books that are read on the beach, whose only aim is to entertain. These books are not concerned with style or creativity - instead they are successful because they are repetitive and follow a template that readers enjoy. — Umberto Eco

Start to laugh and everything will go well. — Deyth Banger

Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters. — Umberto Eco

I will only miss school for an engagement if it is going to bring real change. — Malala Yousafzai

Open text is one of a pair of terms popularized by Eco to refer to kinds of interpretative interactions between text and reader. An open text, unlike a closed one such as a work of popular fiction, is not aimed at a specific reader in a specific social context. It is also open in that its theme, structure and language are more complex, less explicit, more "open-ended": what other critics as Barthes in reception theory would call "Indeterminate". The open text constructs the model of its own reader as part of its structural strategy. — Katie Wales

Lovers to-day and for all time Preserve the meaning of my rhyme: Love is not kindly nor yet grim But does to you as you to him. — Robert Graves

Many fiction writers have used novels to promote social change. Why couldn't I? No matter that I had no experience whatsoever writing fiction. I could learn. I decided on mysteries because I love the genre and could envisage a story featuring climate change researchers hounded by climate change doubters. — Charlene D'Avanzo

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. — Umberto Eco