“In your novels do you lie deliberately or just out of ignorance?"Laughter. A murmur of approval. The writer hesitated a few seconds. Then counter-attacked:"I'm a liar by vocation," he shouted. "I lie with joy! Literature is the only chance for a true liar to attain any sort of social acceptance."Then more soberly, he added - his voice lowered - that the principal difference between a dictatorship and a democracy is that in the former there exists only one truth, the truth as imposed by power, while in free countries every man has the right to defend his own version of events.Truth, he said, is a superstition.”

“Truth is superstition.”

“There are people who from early on reveal a great talent for misfortune. Unhappiness pummels at them like a stoning, every other day, and they accept it with a resigned sigh. Others, meanwhile, have a peculiar propensity for the happiness. Faced with an abyss the latter are attracted by its blueness, the former by its intoxication.”

“Nothing seems true that cannot also seem false.”

“Memory is a landscape watched from the window of a moving train. (...) These things happen right before our very eyes, we know them to be real, but they're so far away we can't touch them. Some are so far, so very far away, and the train moving so fast, that we can't be sure any longer that they really did happen. Maybe we merely dreamed them?”

“Some people are destined to dream (some, indeed, are paid rather well to do so); some are born to work, practical and concrete and tireless; and there are others who are like a river, who flow effortlessly down from source to mouth, hardly straying from its bed.”

“(...) não custa atribuir a obstinada melancolia dos portugueses ao uso desregrado da palavra saudade, no fado, na poesia, no discurso dos filósofos e dos políticos. Seria interessante estudar o quanto o culto à saudade contrariou, vem contrariando, o esforço para desenvolver Portugal. Já a famosa arrogância e optimismo dos angolanos poderia dever-se à insistência em termos como bué («Angola kuia bué!»), futuro, esperança ou vitória. No que respeita à alegria dos brasileiros, poderíamos talvez imputá-la a duas ou três palavras fortes que acompanham desde há muito a construção e o crescimento do país: mulato/mulata, bunda, carnaval.”