Jose Saramago Quotes

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

  Jose Saramago

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  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.

   

  Jose Saramago

• People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it’s only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich.

  Jose Saramago

• Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets. I think what we need is a global protest movement of people who won’t give up.

  Jose Saramago

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

  Jose Saramago

• It is difficult to understand these people who democratically take part in elections and a referendum, but are then incapable of democratically accepting the will of the people.

  Jose Saramago

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

  Jose Saramago

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

  Jose Saramago

• 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.

  Jose Saramago

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

  Jose Saramago

• 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.

  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.

  Jose Saramago

• 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.

  Jose Saramago

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

  Jose Saramago

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

  Jose Saramago

• 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.

  Jose Saramago

• I am the same person I was before receiving the Nobel Prize. I work with the same regularity, I have not modified my habits, I have the same friends.

  Jose Saramago

• I am not a prophet.

  Jose Saramago

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

  Jose Saramago

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

  Jose Saramago

Jose Saramago (49)

Birth:	16th November, 1922
Death:	18th June, 2010
Nationality:	Portuguese
Profession:	Journalist, Novelist, Poet, Writer, Playwriter

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Today's Anniversary - 1st April

Births

• 1929 - Milan Kundera
• 1873 - Sergei Rachmaninoff
• 1922 - Alan Perlis
• 1922 - William Manchester
• 1973 - Rachel Maddow

Deaths

• 1984 - Marvin Gaye
• 1917 - Scott Joplin
• 1991 - Martha Graham
• 1993 - Alan Kulwicki
• 1976 - Max Ernst