Quotes By 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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
The U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.
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