The most interesting letters I received about 'The Name of the Rose' were from people in the Midwest that maybe didn't understand exactly, but wanted to understand more and who were excited by this picture of a world which was not their own.

The poets did not win; the philosophers surrendered.

Your masters at Oxford have taught you to idolize reason, drying up the prophetic capacities of your heart!

The more things you know, or pretend to know, the more powerful you are. It doesn't matter if the things are true. What counts, remember, is to possess a secret.

Terrorism [is] a biological consequence of the multinationals, just as a day of fever is the reasonable price of an effective vaccine . . . The conflict is between great powers, not between demons and heroes. Unhappily, therefore, is the nation that finds the "heroes" underfoot, especially if they still think in religious terms and involve the population in their bloody ascent to an uninhabited paradise.

Whoever reflects on four things I would be better if he were never born: that which is above, that which is below, that which is before, that which is after.

Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.