Jose Saramago

“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 an...”

“In the end, I am quite normal. I don't have odd habits. I don't dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don't talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not h...”

“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?”

“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...”

“I believe myself to be the type of person who does not complicate his life. I have always lived my life without dramatizing things, whether the good things that have happened to me or the ba...”

“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 orga...”

“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 w...”

“A writer's definitive death is when no one reads his books anymore. That's the final death.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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 U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan.”

“The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.”

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

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

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

“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 crit...”