Antonio Tabucchi Quotes

Just because it's a dream doesn't mean it's a lie.

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

History is a fiction which actually happened; fiction is history which could have happened.

Let me tell you the truth. The truth is what is, and what should be is a fantasy. A terrible, terrible lie that someone gave to the people long ago.

Literature is the only access to truth we have on this planet.

If this book has made any point clear, I hope it's that things don't have to be real to be true. Or vice versa.

The world is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously.

Your harshest truths are dreams, and your gentlest dreams are true.

You imagine the carefully pruned, shaped thing that is presented to you is truth. That is just what it isn't. The truth is improbable, the truth is fantastic; it's in what you think is a distorting mirror that you see the truth.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

Imagination is the only true thing in the world!

Photography threatens fantasy.

Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous.

Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being.

What is truer than truth? Answer: the story.

This world may be only illusion -- but it's the only illusion we've got.

My major preoccupation is the question, 'What is reality?'

Nothing in this world is real

Because you continue to inhabit and believe your metaphors, you cannot see what is true.

One cannot conceive of objectivity without subjectivity.

If this be to have sense, if to be awake Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things, For the rarer potion mine own dreams I'll take And for truth commune with imaginings

There is no one truth. There’s only what happened, based on how you perceive it.

Truth is more than a mental exercise.

There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at.