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

"Writing means sharing. It's part of the human condition to want to share things - thoughts, ideas, opinions."

"I can control my destiny, but not my fate. Destiny means there are opportunities to turn right or left, but fate is a one-way street. I believe we all have the choice as to whether we fulfil our destiny, but our fate is sealed."

"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."

"Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words."

"A poem conveys not a message so much as the provenance of a message, an advent of sense."

"The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art."

"But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity, and that being able to join in musical activity, along with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture."