Quotes By 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I am not a prophet.

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.

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.