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Jose Saramago Quotes


A human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction.

Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying you have a political conscience but you don't agree with any of the existing parties.

Americans have discovered fear.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

I always ask two questions: How many countries have military bases in the United States? And in how many countries does the United States not have military bases?

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

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

I am not a prophet.

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.

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 can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement.

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

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.

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