Top 20 Antonio Tabucchi Quotes

I’ve always been drawn to tormented people full of contradictions.

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.

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

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.

I live quietly at home among my family and friends.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

People with lots of doubts sometimes find life more oppressive and exhausting than others, but they’re more energetic – they aren’t robots.

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.

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.

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

I don’t go for people who lead full and satisfying lives.