Quotes By 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets.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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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