Jose Saramago Quotes
-
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 believe myself to be the type of person who does not complicate his life. I have always lived my life without dramatizing things, whether the good things that have happened to me or the bad. I simply live those moments.
-
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 am not a prophet.
-
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.
-
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 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.
-
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.
-
Can you imagine what Bush would say if someone like Hugo Chavez asked him for a little piece of land to install a military base, and he only wanted to plant a Venezuelan flag there?
-
The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.
-
The problem is that the right doesn't need any ideas to govern, but the left can't govern without ideas.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I am a person with leftist convictions, and always have been.
-
Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
-
Americans have discovered fear.
-
The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others.
-
There are plenty of reasons not to put up with the world as it is.
-
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.
-
I think we are blind. Blind people who can see, but do not see.
-
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.
-
A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction.
-
In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die.