"The best thing to do is to loosen my grip on my pen and let it go wandering about until it finds an entrance. There must be one – everything depends on the circumstances, a rule applicable as much to literary style as to life. Each word tugs another one along, one idea another, and that is how books, governments and revolutions are made – some even say that is how Nature created her species."
"A life without fighting is a dead sea in the universal organism."
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Source: Machado de Assis, Gregory Rabassa (1998). “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas: A Novel”, p.185, Oxford University Press, USA
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