Umberto Eco

Award won Role or nomination

1. 1932 age 0

   Born

2. 1961 age 29

   CreditLa Notte

3. 2016 age 84

   Died

• EREraldo Da Roma1 title
• EFEnnio Flaiano1 title
• MMMarcello Mastroianni1 title
• GVGianni Di Venanzo1 title
• TGTonino Guerra1 title
• GMGitt Magrini1 title
• JMJeanne Moreau1 title
• BWBernhard Wicki1 title
• MAMichelangelo Antonioni1 title
• MVMonica Vitti1 title

• Influenced by

  • ADArthur Conan Doyle

Nothing recorded for: Spouse, Partner, Parents, Children, Siblings, Studied under, Taught.

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  Photo:Rob Bogaerts for AnefoCC0

• Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d'état, still use tanks. If a country has reached a high degree of industrialization the whole scene changes. The day after the fall of Khrushchev, the editors of Pravda, Izvestiia, the heads of the radio and television were replaced; the army wasn't called out. Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.

  Umberto Eco, CC BY-SA 4.0

• Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used "to tell" at all.

  Umberto Eco, CC BY-SA 4.0

• The basic principle [of hermetic drift semiotics] is not only that the similar can be known through the similar but also that from similarity to similarity everything can be connected with everything else, so that everything can be in turn either the expression or the content of any other thing.

  Umberto Eco, CC BY-SA 4.0

• A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.

  Umberto Eco, CC BY-SA 4.0

• Epistemological thinkers connected with quantum methodology have rightly warned against an ingenuous transposition of physical categories into the fields of ethics and psychology (for example. the identification of indeterminacy with moral freedom). Hence, it would not be justified to understand my formulation as making an analogy between the structures of the work of art and the supposed structures of the world. Indeterminacy, complementarity, noncausality are not modes of being in the physical world, but systems for describing it in a convenient way. The relationship which concerns my exposition is not the supposed nexus between an "ontological" situation and a morphological feature in the work of art, but the relation between an operative procedure for explaining physical processes and an operative procedure for explaining the processes of artistic production and reception. In other words, the relationship between a scientific methodology and a poetics.

  Umberto Eco, CC BY-SA 4.0

• I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk.

  Umberto Eco, CC BY-SA 4.0