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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.
Jose Saramago -
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.
Jose Saramago
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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.
Jose Saramago -
The problem is that the right doesn't need any ideas to govern, but the left can't govern without ideas.
Jose Saramago -
I am not a prophet.
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 -
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 -
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
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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 am a person with leftist convictions, and always have been.
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 -
To continue living, we have to die. That's the story of humanity - generation after generation - that we are going to die. There's nothing dramatic about death except that one loses one's life.
Jose Saramago -
The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.
Jose Saramago -
In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die.
Jose Saramago
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Americans have discovered fear.
Jose Saramago -
Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets. I think what we need is a global protest movement of people who won't give up.
Jose Saramago -
Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.
Jose Saramago -
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 think we are blind. Blind people who can see, but do not see.
Jose Saramago -
Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
Jose Saramago
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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?
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 -
There are plenty of reasons not to put up with the world as it is.
Jose Saramago -
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.
Jose Saramago