Umberto Eco Quotes

Every writer has to find their own way into writing.

There's many, many ways to write a song. But generally, sitting down at a table and writing is not one of them.

All writers have their own pet commandments.

I think artists should really write more.

Sometimes it can be really exciting, but I avoid the blank page now. What I do is hand write everything. When you're hand writing, there's never a blank page, really. There's so much you can do with that.

Writing is the basis of all, because creating something that didn't even exist before is like taking an empty canvass. It is a wonderful thing to make something out of nothing. You've got an empty page, you've got an idea, and then you start typing and that is the most thrilling thing of all. And then if it becomes a movie or something else that's a plus, but the original writing of it is what's very exciting.

When I start writing, the first line might come from reality, but the second and the third one, I have to write it. So this is the genesis of my creation. If I want to know what happens, if I want to find out the secret, I have to write it.

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult.

I'm a great believer in letting lyrics just flow out, wherever they come from.

I never work from an outline, and often I don't know how the story will end.

When I decide to write a story, I don't think too much about what I want it to be, I just let things come naturally and this is how it turns out. It's just how my subconscious works.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

Sometimes I can see the whole painting from the outset in my mind's eye. But more often than not, that idea doesn't last the duration of the painting. Sometimes it comes out easy, just as I had envisaged. But that is reasonably rare.

I don't ever want to impose something on the story. I want the story to tell me.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.

There's a mystery to writing, and you don't really know where most of it comes from.

What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'

For me as a writer, the story has always taken precedence over everything else. I have never sat down to write with broad, sweeping ideas in mind, and certainly never with a specific agenda.

You can't sit down and decide what you want to write about.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

I don't write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.

I write a lot, and very often I write a couple of lines that are particularly revealing in some kind of way. And then as a few more lines get added and a piece gets added, eventually the song pretty much takes over and you can't really find a way to change those things.