Sometimes I say that writing a novel is the same as constructing a chair: a person must be able to sit in it, to be balanced on it. If I can produce a great chair, even better. But above all I have to make sure that it has four stable feet.

Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.

Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.

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.

Though I had come into the world on 16 November 1922, my official documents show that I was born two days later, on the 18th. It was thanks to this petty fraud that my family escaped from paying the fine for not having registered my birth at the proper legal time.

The best way to killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud.

Globalization is a form of totalitarianism... It is the rich who rule, and the poor live as they can.