Quotes from 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.

Being fired was the best luck of my life. It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.

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 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.

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.

In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die.

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.

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.

A tree weeps when cut down, a dog howls when beaten, but a man matures when offended.

I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement.

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.

The U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan.

We are marching against the law of the jungle that the United States and its acolytes old and new want to impose on the world.

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.

Being fired was the best luck of my life. It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.

Men are angels born without wings, nothing could be nicer than to be born without wings and to make them grow.

Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.

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 don't defend the idea of universal love. It has never existed and will never exist.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things.

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.

Age carries with it a double load of guilt.