Jorge Amado Quotations

The best translations are always the ones in the language the author can't read.

I'm under no illusions about the importance of my work. But if it has any worth, it is that it truly reflects the Brazilian people.

I have already told you Father, more than once: I’m not going to subject myself to a husband chosen for me, I’m not going to bury myself in some planter’s kitchen, and I’m not going to be a servant to some doctor or lawyer in Ilhéus. I want to live my own life. When I finish school at the end of the year, I want to go to work in an office

I am like my characters - sometimes even the female ones.

That’s the very reason why love is eternal,’ concluded João Fulgêncio, ‘because it is forever renewed. Passions die, love remains.

...it is a very risky thing for anyone to go about proclaiming the truth simply because he finds himself in possession of concrete documentary proofs or on the evidence of his own eyes, which is always overestimated.

I believe that she has the kind of magic that causes revolutions and promotes great discoveries. There’s nothing I enjoy more than to observe Gabriela in the midst of a group of people. Do you know what she reminds me of? A fragrant rose in a bouquet of artificial flowers.

Love--the most wonderful and most terrible thing in the world.

The world is like that -- incomprehensible and full of surprises .

Night was running ahead of itself.

Life was good, one had only to live it.

I am a writer who has written about the life of my people, the character of my people. What I can say is that the greatest hero of the Brazilian novel is the Brazilian people.

He owned a whole world full of memories, of lovely moments relived and happy recollections. I'm not saying he was happy or that he didn't suffer. He suffered very much, but he did not despair; he still drew nourishment from what he had been given. But the sadness never left him. Happiness needs more than memories of the past to feed on; it also needs dreams of the future.

Many things I might not write today because I no longer believe them, but I wouldn't change them, since I believed them at the time.

Love is not to be proven or measured...It exists, and that is enough.