My job is to look at what politics is doing, not be a politician myself.

There are some fundamental values it's impossible to be wrong about.

Eco sees the intellectual as an organizer of culture, someone who can run a magazine or a museum. An administrator, in fact. I think this is a melancholy situation for an intellectual.

My job is to look at what politics is doing, not be a politician myself.

A l'intérieur de ce corps vivait l'âme d'une intellectuelle et poète dont personne n'avait le soupçon. Within this body lived the soul of an intellectual and poet, which nobody had suspected.

An intellectual is going to have doubts, for example, about a fundamentalist religious doctrine that admits no doubt, about an imposed political system that allows no doubt, about a perfect aesthetic that has no room for doubt.

No, I'm happy to go on living the life I've chosen. I'm a university teacher and I like my job.