“Sometimes I have these premonitions and I don't forget them, so I will be prepared when they happen.” 

“The point was not to die, since death came anyway, but to survive, which would be a miracle.” 

“She treated him with the casual kindness usually reserved for other people's pets.” 

“I have seen these persons speak unthinkingly, not realizing that to speak is also to be. Word and gesture are man's thought. We should not speak without reason.” 

“that in itself age doesn’t make anyone better or wiser, but only accentuates what they have always been.” 

“Happiness is slippery, it slithers away between your fingers, but problems are something you can hold on to, they’ve got handles, they’re rough and hard” 

“Heroism is a badly remunerated occupation, and often it leads to an early end, which is why it appeals to fanatics or persons with an unhealthy fascination with death. ” 

“You only have what you give. It’s by spending yourself that you become rich.” 

“After a few months without writing, months I've lived turned outward... I fear going deaf, not being able to hear the silence.” 

“It’s easy to judge others when we are not going through the same thing.” 

“Abundance of knowledge does not teach men to be wise.” 

Music for me, it demands full concentration.

I'm not a person that socializes very well.

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.

No, I never saw an angel, but it is irrelevant whether I saw one or not. I feel their presence around me.

I talk to my readers on social networking sites, but I never tell them what the book is about. Writing is lonely, so from time to time I talk to them on the Internet. It's like chatting at a bar without leaving your office. I talk with them about a lot of things other than my books.

I am 100 per cent Virgo, stubborn, over-organised, slightly abstracted from the rest of the world.

My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.

Let us be absolutely clear about one thing: we must not confuse humility with false modesty or servility.

My connection with Brazil is so abstract. My blood and my way of thinking is Brazilian, but that's it. I don't tend to go back to the past, and although I have an apartment there, I rarely visit. When I move, I really move.

I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death. They thought nobody can make a living from being a writer in Brazil. They were not wrong.

There is an afterlife. I am convinced of this.

Today, writers want to impress other writers.

Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worse kind of suffering.