“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...”
More from Umberto Eco on Writing
“There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.”
“the book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. once invented, it cannot be improved”
“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.”
“The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.”
Others on Writing
Ernest Hemingway
17 quotes“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“we do not write as we want but as we can”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Writing is prayer.”
Flaubert
9 quotes“A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.”
Ezra Pound
6 quotes“This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
6 quotes“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”