... that's how life should be, when one person loses heart, the other must have heart and courage enough for both.

There is nothing that is truly free nor democratic enough. Make no mistake, the internet did not come to save the world.

Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels.

The only miracle we can perform is to go on living, said the woman, to preserve the fragility of life from day to day, as if it were blind and did not know where to go, and perhaps it is like that, perhaps it really does not know, it placed itself in our hands, after giving us intelligence.

That is the dream of all novelists-that one of their characters will become 'somebody.'

I was born in a family of landless peasants, in Azinhaga, a small village in the province of Ribatejo, on the right bank of the Almonda River, around a hundred kilometres north-east of Lisbon.

It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.