I'm not a professional. Yet somehow, I manage to get away with it.
Chico Buarque
Most people know my music but will never read my books.
I'm an amateur.
Every time I drive into Rio from the airport, I see the city for the first time and think how strange it is.
Music kind of kidnapped me for a while.
Had I not become entangled with music, I would have become an author much earlier.
Some people thought I was using my popularity as a singer to sell my first novel. For others, it was almost a sacrilege: a practitioner of a minor art daring to enter the field of high art.
Whatever is original in my writing comes from my musical apprenticeship. I look for rhythm in words. I imagine words as if they were musical chords. Often I'll write something, read it, and find it musically unsatisfactory. There is a musical imperative in my choice of words.
