Jose Saramago Quotes

There are those who deny me the right to speak of God, because I am not a believer. And I say that I have every right in the world. I want to talk about God because it is a problem that affects all humanity.

The problem is that the right doesn't need any ideas to govern, but the left can't govern without ideas.

but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probably, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt.

We are so afraid of the idea of having to die... that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn.

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.

Americans have discovered fear.

Today's bread does not eliminate yesterday's hunger, much less that of tomorrow.

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?

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.

You know the name you were given, you do not know the name that you have

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

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

We use words to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.

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.

For me, writing is a job. I do not separate the work from the act of writing like two things that have nothing to do with each other. I arrange words one after another, or one in front of another, to tell a story, to say something that I consider important or useful, or at least important or useful to me. It is nothing more than this.

If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?

Some drivers have already got out of their cars, prepared to push the stranded vehicle to a spot where it will not hold up the traffic, they beat furiously on the closed windows, the man inside turns his head in their direction, first to one side then to the other, he is clearly shouting something, to judge by the movements of his mouth he appears to be repeating some words, no one word but three, as turns out to be the case when someone finally manages to open the door, I am blind.

This is the effect of panic, a natural effect, you could say that animal nature is like this, plant life would behave in exactly the same way, too, if it did not have all those roots to hold it in the ground, and how nice it would be to see the trees of the forest fleeing the flames.

The only time we can talk about death is while we're alive, not afterwards.

a man was on his way to the gallows when he met another, who asked him: where are you going, my friend? and the condemned man replied: i'm not going anywhere. they're taking me by force.

As my cat would say, all hours are good for sleeping.

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

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.

Yet human experience and the practice of communication have shown throughout the ages that definitions are an illusion, like having a speech defect and trying to say love but unable to get the word out, or, better, having a tongue in one's head but unable to feel love.

Lord knows why they depict death with wings when death is everywhere.

Reading is probably another way of being in a place.

Human nature is, by definition, a talkative one, imprudent, indiscreet, gossipy, incapable of closing its mouth and keeping it closed.

The minds of human beings are not always entirely at one with the world in which they live, some people have trouble adjusting to reality, basically they're just weak, confused spirits who use words, sometimes very skillfully, to justify their cowardice.

I believe that I've been asked all possible questions. I, myself, if I were a journalist, would not know what to ask me.

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

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.

The distribution of tasks among the various employees follows a simple rule, which is that the duty of the members of each category is to do as much work as they possibly can, so that only a small part of that work need be passed to the category above. This means that the clerks are obliged to work without cease from morning to night, whereas the senior clerks do so only now and then, the deputies very rarely, and the Registrar almost never.

I consider books to be good for our health, and also our spirits, and they help us to become poets or scientists, to understand the stars or else to discover them deep within the aspirations of certain characters, those who sometimes, on certain evenings, escape from the pages and walk among us humans, perhaps the most human of us all.

With the passage of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the color of our blood and the salt of our tears.

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.

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.

Very few people are aware that in each of our fingers, located somewhere between the firs phalange, the mesophalange and the metaphalange, there is a tiny brain... It should be noted that fingers are without brains, these develop gradually with the passage of time and with the help of what the eyes see... That is why the fingers have always excelled at uncovering what is concealed.

If I could repeat my childhood, I would repeat it exactly as it was, with the poverty, the cold, little food, with the flies and pigs, all that.

I don't think it is worth explaining how a character's nose or chin looks. It is my feeling that readers will prefer to construct, little by little, their own character—the author will do well to entrust the reader with this part of the work.

Perfect moments, especially when they verge on the sublime have the grave disadvantage of being very short lived, which in fact, being obvious, we would not need to mention were it not that they have a still greater disadvantage, which is that we do not know what to do once they are over.

Chaos is order yet undeciphered.

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

Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions. Decisions make us.

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

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

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

We all have our moments of weakness, just as well that we are still capable of weeping, tears are often our salvation, there are times when we would die if we did not weep - Blindness

We say Fine, even though we may be dying, and this is commonly known as taking one's courage in both hands, a phenomenon that has only been observed in the human species.