Quotes By 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
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
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
The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others.
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
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
The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.
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
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
There are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.
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
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
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
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
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
It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.
Jose Saramago