Jose Saramago Quotes
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A writer's definitive death is when no one reads his books anymore. That's the final death.
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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.
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The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.
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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.
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I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.
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As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things.
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The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write.
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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.
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There are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.
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It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.
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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.
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I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.
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The U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan.