Quotes from Jose Saramago

It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.

There are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.

I am a person with leftist convictions, and always have been.

The church has never been asked to explain anything, our speciality, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralisation of the overly curious mind through faith.

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.

No human being can achieve all he or she desires in this life except in dreams, so good night all.

Americans have discovered fear.

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.

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.

just like everything else in life, let time take its course and it will find a solution.

If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.

This must be what it means to be a ghost, being certain that life exists, because your four senses say so, and yet unable to see it.

I am not a prophet.

When we are born, when we enter this world, it is as if we signed a pact for the rest of our life, but a day may come when we will ask ourselves Who signed this on my behalf?

Dignity has no price ... when someone starts making small concessions, in the end life loses all meaning.

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.

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.

At the end of the 1950s, I started working at a publishing company, Estudios Cor, as production manager, so returning, but not as an author, to the world of letters I had left some years before.

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.

Because each of you has his or her own death, you carry it with you in a secret place from the moment you're born, it belongs to you and you belong to it.

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?

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.

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.

The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write.