"As a writer, I've always been interested in others"
About this Quote
A novelist admitting he’s “always been interested in others” is a quiet flex disguised as modesty. Tabucchi isn’t talking about friendliness; he’s talking about method. In a literary culture that loves the myth of the solitary genius excavating his own psyche, he plants his flag on the opposite territory: attention. The line works because it treats curiosity as an ethic, not a quirk. To be “interested in others” is to accept that the self is porous, that identity is built from overheard stories, borrowed gestures, and the moral burden of looking closely.
The phrasing is deliberately plain, almost offhand, which is its own rhetorical move. “Always” implies a lifelong discipline, while “others” stays strategically unspecific: strangers, the dead, the politically disappeared, the alternate selves you might have been. That vagueness opens the door to Tabucchi’s signature preoccupations: doubles, hauntings, fragmented testimonies, Portugal as both real place and imaginative mirror. His work often treats narrative as an afterimage of history, shaped by dictatorship, exile, and the lingering question of who gets to speak.
The subtext is also a rebuke to literary narcissism. Writing becomes less confession than listening, less self-expression than a form of investigative empathy. In Tabucchi’s hands, “interest” isn’t passive; it’s a stance against indifference. It suggests that the writer’s job is to keep other people from being reduced to background noise, even when the world would prefer they stay that way.
The phrasing is deliberately plain, almost offhand, which is its own rhetorical move. “Always” implies a lifelong discipline, while “others” stays strategically unspecific: strangers, the dead, the politically disappeared, the alternate selves you might have been. That vagueness opens the door to Tabucchi’s signature preoccupations: doubles, hauntings, fragmented testimonies, Portugal as both real place and imaginative mirror. His work often treats narrative as an afterimage of history, shaped by dictatorship, exile, and the lingering question of who gets to speak.
The subtext is also a rebuke to literary narcissism. Writing becomes less confession than listening, less self-expression than a form of investigative empathy. In Tabucchi’s hands, “interest” isn’t passive; it’s a stance against indifference. It suggests that the writer’s job is to keep other people from being reduced to background noise, even when the world would prefer they stay that way.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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