Quotes from Antonio Tabucchi

I've always been drawn to tormented people full of contradictions. The more doubts they have the better. People with lots of doubts sometimes find life more oppressive and exhausting than others, but they're more energetic—they aren't robots. I prefer insomnia to anaesthesia. I don't go for people who lead full and satisfying lives.

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.

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.

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

Perfection spawns doctrines, dictators and totalitarian ideas.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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