Explore Quotes by 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.

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.

Death is present every day in our lives. It's not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life.

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

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

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

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

Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying that you understand your responsibility, you have a political conscience and you came to vote, but you don't agree with any of the existing parties and this is the only way you have of saying so.

Americans have discovered fear.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.