Here are reasons as I specify: which having seen my peril to first become an artistic professional, then, before I decided the role of a writer. (MA2013)
"I ought to refer to her as M. Let us say it is a premonition, some vague desire or vow, the simple superstition of appeasing gestures."
"I am writing slowly, writing with enormous effort after six hours of dialogue, and I am probably incapable of expressing vivid sentiments and emotions,"
"...which are set out here with some sense of order, not exactly classified,"
"...but passed from hand to hand and arranged according to their weight, density and (since I have not given up painting) color."
"I cannot write any other way, and if I have thrown myself into this writing, it was precisely in order to give myself sufficient time to think, to think with time."
"To be born, live and die are universal truths which form a natural sequence."
"If we wish to transform them into a personal truth and natural sequence, then we shall have to write much more that the three verbs arranged in that order and concede that between the two extremes of nothingness and nothingness, life may contain a number of births and deaths, not only those of others,"
"...which may touch or distress us, but our own births and deaths."
"Like a cobra, we shed our skin when we no longer fit inside it, or we lose our strength and waste away, and thius only happens to humans."
"A skin which has aged, turned dry and wrinkled covers these pages with black and white pellicles, the words and spaces between them."
- Jose Saramago
