Quotes by Jose Saramago

“Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they dont understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason theyre there is so that we can reach the farther shore, its the other side that matters.”

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

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

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

“What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?”

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

“All the scheming and plotting in the world wont result in something lasting, transcendent. Anything thats authentic, thats real, comes in the form of a gift. Even if by accident.”

“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.”

“This is how everyone has to begin, men who have never known a woman, women who have never known a man, until the day comes for the one who knows to teach the one who does not”

The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others.

Death is present every day in our lives. Its not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life.

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

In the end, I am quite normal. I dont have odd habits. I dont dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I dont talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writers block, all those things that we hear about writers.

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.

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 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 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; its not simply telling a story.

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.