Best-selling Italian novelist Umberto Eco here advises aspiring writers not to take themselves too seriously, but to go step by step and remember that: “You’re 10 per cent inspiration and 90 per cent perspiration.”

If you start off thinking that you’re a true genius and that you’ll be receiving the Nobel Prize any moment, you have a problem: “That kills every literary career.”

Umberto Eco (b. 1932) is an Italian philosopher, semiotician, essayist, literary critic and author widely known for his bestselling novel ‘The Name of the Rose’ (Il nome della rosa) (1983). Among his other novels are ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’ (Il pendolo di Foucault) (1989), ‘The Island of the Day Before’ (L’isola del giorno prima) (1995), ‘Baudolino’ (2000) and ‘The Prague Cemetery’ (Il cimitero di Praga) (2010). He is the founder of the Department of Media Studies at the University of the Republic of San Marina, President of the Graduate School for the Study of the Humanities, University of Bologna, member of the Accademia dei Lincei and an Honorary Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford. He divides his time between an apartment in Milan and a vacation house near Urbino, Italy – both residences have extensive libraries (30,000 volume and 20,000 volume). For more about him see: http://www.umbertoeco.com/en/

Umberto Eco was interviewed in his apartment in Milan by Tonny Vorm in May 2015.  

Camera: Klaus Elmer

Edited by: Klaus Elmer

Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner   

Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2015

Supported by Nordea-fonden