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. – Jose Saramago
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. – Jose Saramago
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. – Jose Saramago
A human being is a being who is constantly ‘under construction,’ but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction. – Jose Saramago
For me, writing is a job. I do not separate the work from the act of writing like two things that have nothing to do with each other. I arrange words one after another, or one in front of another, to tell a story, to say something that I consider important or useful, or at least important or useful to me. – 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
A writer’s definitive death is when no one reads his books anymore. That’s the final death. – 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
There are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything. – 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
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. – Jose Saramago
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. – Jose Saramago
I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it’s not simply telling a story. – 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
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
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
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
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
In the end, I am quite normal. I don’t have odd habits. I don’t dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don’t talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writer’s block, all those things that we hear about writers. – Jose Saramago
The U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan. – Jose Saramago
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. – Jose Saramago
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. – 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
