Quotes by José Saramago

“Death is present every day in our lives. It's not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life.”

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

“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 f...”

“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 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 indust...”

“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 pro...”

“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 thes...”

“Though I had come into the world on 16 November 1922, my official documents show that I was born two days later, on the 18th. It was thanks to this petty fraud that my family escaped from paying th...”

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

“Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.”

“Men are all the same, they think that because they came out of the belly of a woman they know all there is to know about women.”

“Because each of you has his or her own death, you carry it with you in a secret place from the moment you're born, it belongs to you and you belong to it.”

“The church has never been asked to explain anything, our speciality, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralisation of the overly curious mind through faith.”

“... we are only ever pretending to ourselves, never to other people ...”

“However hard he tried, he could never manage to make himself visible to human eyes and not because he can't, since for him nothing is impossible, it's simply that he wouldn't know what face to wear...”

“Authoritarian, paralyzing, circular, occasionally elliptical stock phrases, also jocularly referred to as nuggets of wisdom, are a malignant plague, one of the very worst ever to ravage the earth.”

“There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, spo...”

“a man was on his way to the gallows when he met another, who asked him: where are you going, my friend? and the condemned man replied: i'm not going anywhere. they're taking me by force.”

“En su habitación del hotel la muerte, desnuda, está delante del espejo. No sabe quién es.”

“Even death, faced with the option of death or life, she would choose life.”