Antonio Tabucchi Quotes

personally I don't trust literature that soothes people's consciences.

I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.

My books are about losers, about people who've lost their way and are engaged in a search.

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

Like a blazing comet, I've traversed infinite nights, interstellar spaces of the imagination, voluptuousness and fear. I've been a man, a woman, an old person, a little girl, I've been the crowds on the grand boulevards of the capital cities of the West, I've been the serene Buddha of the East, whose calm and wisdom we envy. I've known honor and dishonor, enthusiasm and exhaustion. ...I've been the sun and the moon, and everything because life is not enough.

I live quietly at home among my family and friends.

I prefer insomnia to anaesthesia.

Perfection spawns doctrines, dictators and totalitarian ideas.

I was born in the Second World War during the Nazi invasion of my country.

Philosophy appears to concern itself only with the truth, but perhaps expresses only fantasies, while literature appears to concern itself only with fantasies, but perhaps it expresses the truth.

Rather than regret for what I have written, I feel regret for what I shall never be able to read.

As a writer, I've always been interested in others.

I claim the right to take a stand once in a while.

The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture.

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.

Literature for me isn't a workaday job, but something which involves desires, dreams and fantasy.

Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher.

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

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.

In a novel, my feelings and sense of outrage can find a broader means of expression which would be more symbolic and applicable to many European countries.

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.

It's very useful when politicians have doubts because there are so many choices to be made in the world.

The most important basis of any novel is wanting to be someone else, and this means creating a character.

But I don't think I have any particular talent for prediction, because when you have three or four elements in hand, you don't have to be a genius to reach certain conclusions.

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