Quotes By 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets.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.

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?

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

I am not a prophet.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.

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.

Americans have discovered fear.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.