[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits.
I started to write [The Name of the Rose] in March of 1978, moved by a seminal idea. I wanted to poison a monk.
I write what I write.
There must be a connection between the lust for power and impotentia coeundi. I liked Marx, I was sure that he and his Jenny had made love merrily. You can feel it in the easy pace of his prose and in his humor. On the other hand, I remember remarking one day in the corridors of the university that if you screwed Krupskaya all the time, you'd end up writing a lousy book like Materialism and Empiriocriticism.
I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel.
Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.
I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.
![[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits.](http://cdn.quoteddaily.com/images/umberto-eco/in-my-writing-i-know-that-i-have-made-a-caricature-out-of-others-academic-theories-but-i-think-that.jpg)
