Life & Wisdom Quote by Antonio Tabucchi

Tabucchi smuggles a slightly scandalous idea into what sounds like craft advice: the novel isn’t built on plot or even language, but on envy - on the itch to exit your own skin. “Wanting to be someone else” reframes fiction as a controlled form of impersonation, a sanctioned identity theft that turns private dissatisfaction into art. It’s also a quiet rebuke to the pieties of “write what you know.” For Tabucchi, knowledge is less important than desire: the imaginative pressure to cross borders (social, moral, even metaphysical) is what generates narrative voltage.

The second clause tightens the screw. Wanting alone is vapor; it only becomes a novel when it congeals into “creating a character.” Character here isn’t a dossier of traits but a vessel sturdy enough to hold projection and contradiction. Tabucchi implies that the novelist’s first real responsibility is not to be sincere, but to be convincingly other - to manufacture a consciousness with its own gravity. That’s why the line lands: it treats character as the technology that makes longing legible.

Context matters. Tabucchi’s work, steeped in Pessoa, doubles, and shifting identities, is obsessed with the porousness of the self; his narrators often feel like people living adjacent to their own lives. This quote reads like a manifesto from that terrain: novels are engines for alternative selves, and the writer’s job is to build the engine, not moralize about the hunger that powers it.