ANTONIO TABUCCHI

I prefer insomnia to anaesthesia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

The salt of any interesting civilization is mixture.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I live quietly at home among my family and friends.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.