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.

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

...the human being to lack that second skin we call egoism has not yet been born, it lasts much longer than the other one, that bleeds so readily.

There is nothing healthier for a man than to walk on his own two legs.

People might ask me, What do you propose instead? I propose nothing. I am a mere novelist, I just write about the world as I see it. It is not my job to transform it. I cannot transform it all by myself, and I wouldn't even know how to. I limit myself to saying what I believe the world to be.

A woman is essentially a vessel made to be filled.

Words have their own hierarchy, their own protocol, their own artistic titles, their own plebeian stigmas.