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.

Naturally, everything depends on one's background books and on what one is looking for.

What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action.

And when someone suggests you believe in a proposition, you must first examine it to see whether it is acceptable, because our reason was created by God, and whatever pleases our reason can but please divine reason, of which, for that matter, we know only what we infer from the processes of our own reason by analogy and often by negation.

We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.

Is it possible to say "It was a beautiful morning at the end of November" without feeling like Snoopy?

How beautiful was the spectacle of nature not yet touched by the often perverse wisdom of man!