Quotes from Jose Saramago

I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it.

A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction.

Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.

Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying you have a political conscience but you don't agree with any of the existing parties.

I think we are blind. Blind people who can see, but do not see.

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.

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.

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

A writer is a man like any other: he dreams. And my dream was to be able to say of this book, when I finished: 'This is a book about Alentejo.'

No, there are three people in a marriage, there's the woman, there's the man, and there's what I call the third person, the most important, the person who is composed of the man and woman together.

I don't doubt that a man can live perfectly well on his own, but I'm convinced that he begins to die as soon as he closes the door of his house behind him.

There is nothing healthier for a man than to walk on his own two legs.

Doesn't anybody understand that killing in the name of God only makes Him a murderer?

Death is the inventor of God.

The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with god, for he doesn't understand us, and we don't understand him.

We live in a very peculiar world. Democracy isn't discussed, as if it was taken for granted, as if democracy had taken God's place, who is also not discussed.

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.

We know that happiness is short-lived, that we fail to cherish it when it is within our grasp and value it only when it has vanished forever.

Each day is a little bit of history

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.

Men are all the same, they think that because they came out of the belly of a woman they know all there is to know about women.

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?

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

If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.