Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974.
Jose SaramagoAt 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.
Jose SaramagoIn 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.
Jose SaramagoBut truths need to be repeated many times so that they don't, poor things, lapse into oblivion.
Jose SaramagoWe 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.
Jose SaramagoPeople might ask me, What do you propose instead? I propose nothing. I am a mere novelist, I just write about the world as I see it. It is not my job to transform it. I cannot transform it all by myself, and I wouldn't even know how to. I limit myself to saying what I believe the world to be.
Jose Saramago