António Lobo Antunes quotes

António Lobo Antunes is a renowned Portuguese novelist and psychiatrist, celebrated for his complex and introspective literary style. His works often explore themes of memory, identity, and the lasting effects of Portugal’s colonial past. He has received numerous literary awards and is considered one of the leading voices in contemporary European literature. Here are 10 of his quotes:

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.

António Lobo Antunes

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.

António Lobo Antunes

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

António 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.

António Lobo Antunes

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

António 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.

António 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.

António Lobo Antunes

Nothing else exists for them [Psychiatrists] in the universe beyond enormous mothers and fathers, colossal, almost cosmic, and a child reduced to an anus, penis, and mouth who maintains with these two unbearable creatures a singular relationship from which are excluded spontaneity and joy.

António Lobo Antunes

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

António Lobo Antunes