Antonio Lobo Antunes Quotes & Sayings

I was very interested in the relationship between the man who speaks and the woman who listens. I was drawn to the idea that the relationship between a man and a woman can be something like a war itself, very cruel and violent. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

Agitated on the inside by disgust but with nothing showing in their immobile features, absolutely still, as unmoving as those of landscapes, of photographs, of summer sunsets, nothing showing in their ever-horizontal features, decomposing silently in the Formica chairs. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

We should all use suspenders to keep our souls from slipping down to our heels. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

I'm just giving you some spiel, the ludicrous plot of a novel, a story I invented to touch your heart - one-third bullshit, one-third booze, and one-third genuine tenderness, you know the kind of thing. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

Whenever anyone declares having read a book of mine I am disappointed by the error. That's because my books are not to be read in the sense usually called reading: the only way it seems to me to approach the novels that I write is to catch them in the same manner that one catches an illness. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

I thought, Hatred is vital to good health, and I thought, To find ourselves in harmony with the world is a lethal infection. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

Let me be very clear. For me geography does not exist! I strongly object to the whole concept of "foreign literature"...and speaking of national identity: that is how dictatorships get started! In literature there is no periphery and no center; there are only writers. The problem is not geographic but rather numeric. In the 19th century there were at least thirty literary geniuses in Russia, Germany, France, England and the United States. Today we are lucky if there are five writers of that caliber in the whole world...Where does one find good literature today? Mostly in third world countries, because adversity, isolation, combat provide good working conditions. It is harder to be a good writer in a so-called "civilized" country, in the so-called "democracies. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

A long time ago, I read in a book that a woman's homeland is wherever she fell in love. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

There are 3 or 4 important things in life: Books, Friends, Women ... and Messi — Antonio Lobo Antunes

Of all the doctors I have known, psychoanalysts, a congregation of lay priests with bible, rites, and the faithful, constitute the most sinister, the most ridiculous, the most unwholesome of the species. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

Asylums are nothing more than gardens of human cabbages, of miserable, grotesque, repugnant human beings watered with the fertilizer of injections. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

I suppose I have become a sort of living monument in Portugal. But I come from a family with roots all over the world, so the idea of patriotism is not very strong in me. My country is the country of Chekhov, Beethoven, Velasquez - writers I like, painters and artists I admire. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

Physically it's kind of lassitude, the apathy and tiredness that precedes the flu or some other illness, or death. My legs ache and feel heavy, my skin has become more sensitive to cold and to heat, to the hardness or rigidity of things. Nothing interests me, I feel uncomfortable being still but would feel even more uncomfortable if I moved. I don't know whether speaking is painful or just boring. I sit here, staring straight ahead, with no desires, no needs, hollow. I'm not even sad. I feel only passivity and indifference. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

It's funny - my wife is more jealous of my books than of other women because I'm always working and thinking about my books. — Antonio Lobo Antunes