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

Consciences keep silence more often than they should, that's why laws were created.

The beginning is never the clear, precise end of a thread, the beginning is a long, painfully slow process that requires time and patience in order to find out in which direction it is heading, a process that feels its way along the path ahead like a blind man the beginning is just the beginning, what came before is nigh on worthless.

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.

Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word, not deserving in its own right, but because of the possible consequences of saying it.

The only time we can talk about death is while we're alive, not afterwards.

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.