Jose Saramago Quotes

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Jose Saramago

Profession : Writer

Birth : November 16, 1922

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

Jose Saramago

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

Jose Saramago

Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer.

Jose Saramago

We're not short of movements proclaiming that a different world is possible, but unless we can coordinate them into an international movement, capitalism just laughs at all these little organisations.

Jose Saramago

Things will be very bad for Latin America. You only have to consider the ambitions and the doctrines of the empire, which regards this region as its backyard.

Jose Saramago

The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins.

Jose Saramago

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

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Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets.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

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 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 better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

Jose Saramago

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?

Jose Saramago

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

Jose Saramago

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.

Jose Saramago

Americans have discovered fear.

Jose Saramago

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

Jose Saramago