Antonio Tabucchi

“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.”

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

“The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”