Jose Saramago Quotes

The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.

- Jose Saramago

I am a person with leftist convictions, and always have been.

- Jose Saramago

The period that I could consider the most important in my literary work came about beginning with the Revolution, and in a certain way, developed as a consequence of the Revolution. But it was also a result of the counterrevolutionary coup of November 1975.

- Jose Saramago

When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day.

- Jose Saramago

I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the industrial and commercial process of 'cultural lamination' that the USA is perpetrating on the planet.

- Jose Saramago

Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that ominous fragility that the rest of the world either already experienced or is experiencing now with terrible intensity.

- Jose Saramago

A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction.

- Jose Saramago

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

- Jose Saramago

The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens.

- Jose Saramago

As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things.

- Jose Saramago

Things will be very bad for Latin America. You only have to consider the ambitions and the doctrines of the empire, which regards this region as its backyard.

- Jose Saramago

We're not short of movements proclaiming that a different world is possible, but unless we can coordinate them into an international movement, capitalism just laughs at all these little organisations.

- Jose Saramago

Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets. I think what we need is a global protest movement of people who won't give up.

- Jose Saramago

A writer's definitive death is when no one reads his books anymore. That's the final death.

- Jose Saramago

Though I had come into the world on 16 November 1922, my official documents show that I was born two days later, on the 18th. It was thanks to this petty fraud that my family escaped from paying the fine for not having registered my birth at the proper legal time.

- Jose Saramago

Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying you have a political conscience but you don't agree with any of the existing parties.

- Jose Saramago

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

- Jose Saramago

I am the same person I was before receiving the Nobel Prize. I work with the same regularity, I have not modified my habits, I have the same friends.

- Jose Saramago

It is difficult to understand these people who democratically take part in elections and a referendum, but are then incapable of democratically accepting the will of the people.

- Jose Saramago

I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story.

- Jose Saramago

I was born in a family of landless peasants, in Azinhaga, a small village in the province of Ribatejo, on the right bank of the Almonda River, around a hundred kilometres north-east of Lisbon.

- Jose Saramago

I was a good pupil at primary school: in the second class I was writing with no spelling mistakes, and the third and fourth classes were done in a single year.

- Jose Saramago

It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.

- Jose Saramago

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.

- Jose Saramago

Death is present every day in our lives. It's not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life.

- Jose Saramago

At the end of the 1950s, I started working at a publishing company, Estudios Cor, as production manager, so returning, but not as an author, to the world of letters I had left some years before.

- Jose Saramago

Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974.

- Jose Saramago

People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it's only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich.

- Jose Saramago

The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others.

- Jose Saramago

I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.

- Jose Saramago

Can you imagine what Bush would say if someone like Hugo Chavez asked him for a little piece of land to install a military base, and he only wanted to plant a Venezuelan flag there?

- Jose Saramago

Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer.

- Jose Saramago

The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins.

- Jose Saramago

Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought.

- Jose Saramago

What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?

- Jose Saramago

I believe myself to be the type of person who does not complicate his life. I have always lived my life without dramatizing things, whether the good things that have happened to me or the bad. I simply live those moments.

- Jose Saramago

In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die.

- Jose Saramago

In the end, I am quite normal. I don't have odd habits. I don't dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don't talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writer's block, all those things that we hear about writers.

- Jose Saramago

I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work.

- Jose Saramago

Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.

- Jose Saramago

The U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan.

- Jose Saramago

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

- Jose Saramago

Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.

- Jose Saramago

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

- Jose Saramago

The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write.

- Jose Saramago

For me, writing is a job. I do not separate the work from the act of writing like two things that have nothing to do with each other. I arrange words one after another, or one in front of another, to tell a story, to say something that I consider important or useful, or at least important or useful to me.

- Jose Saramago

I don't defend the idea of universal love. It has never existed and will never exist.

- Jose Saramago

To continue living, we have to die. That's the story of humanity - generation after generation - that we are going to die. There's nothing dramatic about death except that one loses one's life.

- Jose Saramago

I always ask two questions: How many countries have military bases in the United States? And in how many countries does the United States not have military bases?

- Jose Saramago

I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement.

- Jose Saramago

I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it.

- Jose Saramago

I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I'm a writer, but I live in this world, and my writing doesn't exist on a separate level. And if people know who I am and read my books, well, good; that way, if I have something more to say, then everyone benefits.

- Jose Saramago

There are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.

- Jose Saramago

I am not a prophet.

- Jose Saramago

Being fired was the best luck of my life. It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.

- Jose Saramago

The problem is that the right doesn't need any ideas to govern, but the left can't govern without ideas.

- Jose Saramago

There are plenty of reasons not to put up with the world as it is.

- Jose Saramago

I think we are blind. Blind people who can see, but do not see.

- Jose Saramago

Americans have discovered fear.

- Jose Saramago