In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.

What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside of me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life--me, so calm and peaceful?

If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.

Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.

I carry my awareness of defeat like a banner of victory.

To live is to be someone else. Feeling is impossible if we feel today as we felt yesterday: to feel today the same thing we felt yesterday is not to feel at all--it's merely to remember today what we felt yesterday, since today we are the living cadaver of yesterday's lost life.

Nobody appropriates novelties as readily as the Portuguese.