top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Portuguese Authors
"I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are."
"There was interest from clubs in Italy and England, I believe. But I've never been attracted by the way they play in Italy. Staying in Spain was always my preference."
"Who needs fan mail when you have the Internet?"
"The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers."
"People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it's only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich."
"Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets. I think what we need is a global protest movement of people who won't give up."
"There are plenty of reasons not to put up with the world as it is."
"Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt."
"It's just a bunch of songs. I'm not trying to cure any major disease."
"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."
"Obviously the biggest change is that it's me by myself. When you don't have another band interpreting your songs or playing them the way that they have, it's bound to sound different."
"It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power."
"The touring part is really mixed. You love to play and you can't wait to go, but you don't want to leave."
"Even with Extreme, I don't think you have a choice but to sort of have somewhat of an influence of the times."
"When you are in this business and this career, it's hard for any one thing to engulf you."
"I don't say we are a defensive team. I say we are a strong team in defensive terms, but at the same time lacking sufficient fluidity in attack because that will take time to come."
"I am the same person I was before receiving the Nobel Prize. I work with the same regularity, I have not modified my habits, I have the same friends."
"Lots of young players have triumphed at United, so why can't it happen to me? I'm not worried I'm young - it's an incentive to do the best I can."
"Live are a really good band. I like Stone Temple Pilots, Radiohead I love. Even Oasis."
"I enjoy the work, I enjoy every minute of my professional life."
"At first, it's unfamiliar, then it strikes root."
"There's two facets to writing a song. There's you sitting in your room writing the sentiments of the song; the lyrics, the melody and the changes, and then there's the part where you go into the studio and you put clothing on it."
"Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is."
"Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are."
"A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction."
"I'm living a dream I never want to wake up from."
"I always ask two questions: How many countries have military bases in the United States? And in how many countries does the United States not have military bases?"
"Hollywood, it has treated me so nicely, I am ready to faint! As soon as I see Hollywood, I love it."
"Facing the press is not easy, but because you have to go, you have to try to take a lot of positive things for yourself from these face-to-face meetings."
"To choose ways of not acting was ever the concern and scruple of my life."
"Success consists in being successful, not in having potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but there's no palace till it's built."
"The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins."
"As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things."
"Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer."
"Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that ominous fragility that the rest of the world either already experienced or is experiencing now with terrible intensity."
"The only thing I would like is to have more control of the game in terms of possession."
"The Porto players were with me for two and a half years, they believed in me, in my methods, in the way we do it. The next day I go and a manager arrives who works completely differently."
"Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought."
"The U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan."
"The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO."
"The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others."
"Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates."
"I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work."
bottom of page