He had prepared his death much earlier, in his imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was planning the reality of that dea… - Umberto Eco

If you want to become a man of letters and perhaps write some Histories one day, you must also lie and invent tales, otherwise your History would become monotonous. But you must act with restraint. The world condemns liars who do nothing but lie, even about the most trivial things, and it rewards poets, who lie only about the greatest things.

What is life if not the shadow of a fleeting dream?

I am mimetic. If I write a book set in the seventeenth century, I write in a Baroque style. If I’m writing a book set in a newspaper office, I write in Journalese.