Author

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.

From Jose Saramago

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.

From Jose Saramago

I think the novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers. The novel receives streams of science, philosophy, poetry and contains all of these; it's not simply telling a story.

From Jose Saramago

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.

From Jose Saramago

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

From 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.

From Jose Saramago

I was a good pupil at primary school: in the second class I was writing with no spelling mistakes, and the third and fourth classes were done in a single year.

From 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 another, to tell a story, to say something that I consider important or useful, or at least important or useful to me.

From Jose Saramago

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 have a fear of the blank page, writer's block, all those things that we hear about writers.

From Jose Saramago

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.

From Jose Saramago

Jose Saramago

Notable Quotes

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