Antonio Tabucchi Quotes & Sayings

#1. The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture.

Antonio Tabucchi

#2. It's the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection.

Antonio Tabucchi

#3. I prefer insomnia to anaesthesia.

Antonio Tabucchi

#4. Xenophobia manifests itself especially against civilizations and cultures that are weak because they lack economic resources, means of subsistence or land. So nomadic people are the first targets of this kind of aggression.

Antonio Tabucchi

#5. 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.

Antonio Tabucchi

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

Antonio Tabucchi

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

Antonio Tabucchi

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

Antonio Tabucchi

#9. I don't have any doubts either about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Perhaps some more should be added to the list, but I don't have the slightest doubt about human rights.

Antonio Tabucchi

#10. But democracy isn't a state of perfection. It has to be improved, and that means constant vigilance.

Antonio Tabucchi

#11. I've come to realize one thing, that stories are always bigger than we are, they happen to us and we are their protagonists without realizing it, but in the stories we live, we aren't the true protagonists, the true protagonist is the story itself.

Antonio Tabucchi

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

Antonio Tabucchi

#13. I live quietly at home among my family and friends.

Antonio Tabucchi

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

Antonio Tabucchi

#15. Perfection spawns doctrines, dictators and totalitarian ideas.

Antonio Tabucchi

#16. When you have a foreign invasion - in this case by the Indonesian army - writers, intellectuals, newspapers and magazines are the first targets of repression.

Antonio Tabucchi

#17. 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.

Antonio Tabucchi

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

Antonio Tabucchi

#19. Fifty years after half a million gypsies were exterminated in the Second World War - thousands of them in Auschwitz - we're again preparing the mass killing of this minority.

Antonio Tabucchi

#20. I don't know whether these people are going to find themselves, but as they live their lives they have no choice but to face up to the image others have of them. They're forced to look at themselves in a mirror, and they often manage to glimpse something of themselves.

Antonio Tabucchi

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

Antonio Tabucchi

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

Antonio Tabucchi

#23. 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.

Antonio Tabucchi

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

Antonio Tabucchi

#25. Personally I don't trust literature that soothes people's consciences.

Antonio Tabucchi

#26. 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.

Antonio Tabucchi

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

Antonio Tabucchi

#28. 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.

Antonio Tabucchi

#29. I don't want to promote my own image either. I don't like going on television or mixing in literary circles.

Antonio Tabucchi

#30. 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.

Antonio Tabucchi

#31. People with lots of doubts sometimes find life more oppressive and exhausting than others, but they're more energetic - they aren't robots.

Antonio Tabucchi

#32. I've always been drawn to tormented people full of contradictions.

Antonio Tabucchi

#33. Doubts are like stains on a shirt. I like shirts with stains, because when I'm given a shirt that's too clean, one that's completely white, I immediately start having doubts.

Antonio Tabucchi