Explore Quotes by Jose Saramago

We say Fine, even though we may be dying, and this is commonly known as taking one's courage in both hands, a phenomenon that has only been observed in the human species.

Not only does the universe have its own laws, all of them indifferent to the contradictory dreams and desires of humanity, and in the formulation of which we contribute not one iota, apart, that is, from the words by which we clumsily name them, but everything seems to indicate that it uses these laws for aims and objectives that transcend and always will transcend our understanding.

We are marching against the law of the jungle that the United States and its acolytes old and new want to impose on the world.

Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters...

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was born in a family of landless peasants, in Azinhaga, a small village in the province of Ribatejo, on the right bank of the Almonda River, around a hundred kilometres north-east of Lisbon.

The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens.

Though I had come into the world on 16 November 1922, my official documents show that I was born two days later, on the 18th. It was thanks to this petty fraud that my family escaped from paying the fine for not having registered my birth at the proper legal time.

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.

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 can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I'm a writer, but I live in this world, and my writing doesn't exist on a separate level. And if people know who I am and read my books, well, good; that way, if I have something more to say, then everyone benefits.

I was a good pupil at primary school: in the second class I was writing with no spelling mistakes, and the third and fourth classes were done in a single year.

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.

At the end of the 1950s, I started working at a publishing company, Estudios Cor, as production manager, so returning, but not as an author, to the world of letters I had left some years before.

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

When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day.

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 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.