What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.

From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history.

Conspiracies and all the theories of conspiracy are a part of the canon of fakes. And I'm involved, in all of my writings, the theoretical ones as well as the novels, with the production of fakes.

The Templars' mental confusion makes them indecipherable. That's why so many people venerate them.

The light in her eyes was beyond description, yet it did not instill improper thoughts: it inspired a love tempered by awe, purifying the hearts it inflamed.

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.

The followers must feel besieged.

A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.

The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species.

But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.

On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German Monk toward the end of the fourteenth century...First of all, what style should I employ?

He had perhaps seen fifty springs and was therefore already very old, but his tireless body moved with an agility I myself often lacked.

God is pure nothingness, touched by neither Now nor Here.

The beauty of the universe consists not only of unity in variety, but also of variety in unity.

People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.

Sometimes you say things with a smile with the precise intention of making it clear that you are not being serious, and are only kidding. If I salute a friend with a smile and say, How are you, you old scoundrel! clearly I don't really mean he's a scoundrel.

The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked.

And so it was that the Poet, through an excess of theological refinement, was unable to satisfy his coarse carnal passion.

Because reasoning about causes and effects is a very difficult thing, and I believe the only judge of that can be God. We are already hard put to establish a relationship between such an obvious effect as a charred tree and the lightning bolt that set fire to it, so to trace sometimes endless chains of causes and effects seems to me as foolish as trying to build a tower that will touch the sky.

National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.