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

The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are the subject of my novels.

This must be what it means to be a ghost, being certain that life exists, because your four senses say so, and yet unable to see it.

we would understand much more about life’s complexities if we applied ourselves to an assiduous study of its contradictions, instead of wasting time on identities and coherences, seeing as these have a duty to provide their own explanations.

Writer's make national literature, while translators make universal literature.

In the end, I am quite normal. I don't have odd habits. I don't dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don't talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writer's block, all those things that we hear about writers.

I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.