The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are
the subject of my novels.
Jose Saramago |
Every man has his own patch of earth to cultivate. What’s
important is that he dig deep.
Jose Saramago |
I was not born for all this glory.
Jose Saramago
On winning Nobel Prize for Literature 1998. |
The apprentice thought, "we are blind", and he sat
down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read
it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human
dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world,
that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that
man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due
to his fellow-creatures.
Jose Saramago
On writing novel Blindness, Nobel Prize
for Literature acceptence speech, 1998. |
In one sense it could even be said that, letter-by-letter,
word-by-word, page-by-page, book after book, I have been successively
implanting in the man I was the characters I created. I believe
that without them I wouldn't be the person I am today; without
them maybe my life wouldn't have succeeded in becoming more
than an inexact sketch, a promise that like so many others remained
only a promise, the existence of someone who maybe might have
been but in the end could not manage to be.
Jose Saramago
Nobel lecture, 1998. |
The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist
writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence,
not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we
are citizens. As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene
and become involved, it's the citizen who changes things. I
can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political
involvement. Yes, I'm a writer, but I live in this world and
my writing doesn't exist on a separate level. And if people
know who I am and read my books, well, good; that way, if I
have something more to say, then everyone benefits.
Jose Saramago
The Observer newspaper UK, May 2006. |
I am not a bad person. I hurt only with my tongue!
Jose Saramago |
We live in a dark age, when freedoms are diminishing, when
there is no space for criticism, when totalitarianism —
the totalitarianism of multinational corporations, of the marketplace
— no longer even needs an ideology, and religious intolerance
is on the rise. Orwell’s ‘1984’ is already here.
Jose Saramago
New York Times, 2007. |
I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind
but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.
Jose Saramago
Blindness. |
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.
Jose Saramago
Blindness. |
For dignity has no price, that when someone starts making
small concessions, in the end, life loses all meaning.
Jose Saramago
Blindness. |
Just like everything else in life, let time take its course
and it will find a solution.
Jose Saramago
Blindness. |
Inside us there is something that has no name, that something
is what we are.
Jose Saramago
Blindness. |
Blind people do not need a name, I am my voice, nothing else
matters.
Jose Saramago
Blindness. |
The difficult thing isn’t living with other people, it’s
understanding them.
Jose Saramago
Blindness. |
I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can
see, but do not see.
Jose Saramago
Blindness. |
There are times when it is best to be content with what one
has, so as not to lose everything.
Jose Saramago
The Double. |
In the end we discover the only condition for living is to
die.
Jose Saramago
On his 2005 novel Death With Interruptions,
which depicts Death as woman who goes on strike because she
is fed up with being hated by people. |
All my books without exception deal with the improbable and
the impossible.
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 |
Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.
Jose Saramago |
What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars
and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?
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
On how September 11 changed the world. |
Americans have discovered fear.
Jose Saramago
On September 11 terrorist attack. |
We use words to understand each other and even, sometimes,
to find each other.
Jose Saramago |
Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get
beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand
that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing
river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach
the farther shore, it's the other side that matters.
Jose Saramago |
Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never
will be of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything
that can be humanly experienced and felt.
Jose Saramago |
All the scheming and plotting in the world won't result in
something lasting, transcendent. Anything that's authentic,
that's real, comes in the form of a gift. Even if by accident.
Jose Saramago |
Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs,
making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of
what it is.
Jose Saramago |
I don't trust television, unless I can see things with these
eyes of mine that the earth will one day devour, I don’t
believe in them.
Jose Saramago
Character in The Stone Raft. |
This is how everyone has to begin, men who have never known
a woman, women who have never known a man, until the day comes
for the one who knows to teach the one who does not.
Jose Saramago
Mary in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. |
If my grandfather had been a rich landowner and not an illiterate
pig breeder, I wouldn’t be the man I am today. If I could
choose my own background — even with the cold of the winters,
the heat of the summers, sometimes going hungry — I wouldn’t
change a thing.
Jose Saramago |
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