Antonio Tabucchi Quotes

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Antonio Tabucchi

Profession : Writer

Birth : September 24, 1943

I live quietly at home among my family and friends.

Antonio Tabucchi

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

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

Like a blazing comet, I've traversed infinite nights, interstellar spaces of the imagination, voluptuousness and fear.

Antonio Tabucchi

Perfection spawns doctrines, dictators and totalitarian ideas.

Antonio Tabucchi

The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture.

Antonio Tabucchi

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

Antonio Tabucchi

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

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

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

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

Antonio Tabucchi

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

Antonio Tabucchi

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

Antonio Tabucchi

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

Antonio Tabucchi

We all want to be someone else but without ceasing to be ourselves. I think it's very important to defend this idea in real life too.

Antonio Tabucchi

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

Antonio Tabucchi

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

Antonio Tabucchi

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

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

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