Joaquim Barbosa

In politics, my role model would be a very weird one - our second emperor, Pedro the Second. He was a person with no vanity. He cared a lot about the public interest. He cared a lot about Brazil evolving as an important country. And he didn't ask much for himself. He was ousted from power, and he lived with the help of friends in Paris.

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.