Antonio Lobo Antunes Quotes

Antonio Lobo Antunes's cynical line about readers loving and abandoning him reveals a raw, resentful humor.

13 quotes

Os leitores sao umas putas, amam-nos e depois deixam-nos.

#1
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Asylums are nothing more than gardens of human cabbages, of miserable, grotesque, repugnant human beings watered with the fertilizer of injections.
A long time ago, I read in a book that a woman's homeland is wherever she fell in love.
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.
“I thought, Hatred is vital to good health, and I thought, To find ourselves in harmony with the world is a lethal infection.”
“(...) o afinador chegava na camioneta da carreira para consertar a harpa da dona Irene e horas num só acorde a aparafusar com o alicatezito melancolias erradas até que a vida no timbre que lhe pertencia e o tio emocionado - É exactamente o que eu sinto”
“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.”