The difficult thing isn't living with other people, it's understanding them.

I consider books to be good for our health, and also our spirits, and they help us to become poets or scientists, to understand the stars or else to discover them deep within the aspirations of certain characters, those who sometimes, on certain evenings, escape from the pages and walk among us humans, perhaps the most human of us all.

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.

For human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born.

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

It is strange how the elderly fall silent when they ought to go on speaking, obliging the young to learn everything from scratch.

Americans have discovered fear.