“I’ve lived on royalties all my life. It is the readers who have supported me.”

My pen is alight and my body aflame. Until both burn down to ash, my love and my hate will remain here in the world.

Only by not forgetting the past can we be the master of the future.

Before my eyes are many miserable scenes, the suffering of others and myself forces my hands to move. I become a machine for writing.

You have your thoughts and I have mine. This is the fact and you can’t change it even if you kill me.

I write just because the fire of my emotion is burning. Had I not, I would not have been able to find peace.

I am a person always full of contradictions… It was hard to choose whether to devote myself to revolution as a soldier or as a writer.

Victory is for them, not for us. We have not made profit out of our country’s misfortune. Victory does not bring us luck.

I believe in the future a new Dante will write a new Divine Comedy.

Loving truth and living honestly is my attitude to life. Be true to yourself and be true to others, thus you can be the judge of your behavior.

I have spent myself on all kinds of things … I have advanced much politically but I have written little and moreover have written it badly.

So likewise in João Gilberto Noll, readers shouldn’t expect samba and Carnival and football. The Brazilian national identity is not one of his primary concerns.

You have to expose part of yourself to create a character deep enough for readers to care about.

Being a poor reader was enough to make me not want to do that type of formatted show

As I see it, my job as a writer isn’t to judge, but to take a reader as far inside as I can and let them dwell there.

The unadmitted reason why traditional readers are hostile to e-books is that we still hold the superstitious idea that a book is like a soul, and that every soul should have its own body.

Multitudes of words are neither an argument of clear ideas in the writer, nor a proper means of conveying clear notions to the reader.

My interest is always to get as deeply as I can into the minds and spirits of the characters and let the readers empathize or judge as they will.

This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.