To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world. This is the consoling function of narrative - the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time.

In the United States, politics is a profession, whereas in Europe it is a right and a duty.

Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which gener…

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

There are certain common privileges of a writer, the benefit whereof, I hope, there will be no reason to doubt; particularly, that where I am not understood, i…

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.

Myth is the nothing that is all.