The problem is that the right doesn’t need any ideas to govern, but the left can’t govern without ideas. Jose Saramago Read Quote
I don’t defend the idea of universal love. It has never existed and will never exist. Jose Saramago Read Quote
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 was also a result of the counterrevolutionary coup of November 1975. Jose Saramago Read Quote
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. Jose Saramago Read Quote
I was born in a family of landless peasants, in Azinhaga, a small village in the province of Ribatejo, on the right bank of the Almonda River, around a hundred kilometres north-east of Lisbon. Jose Saramago Read Quote
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. Jose Saramago Read Quote
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. Jose Saramago Read Quote
At the end of the 1950s, I started working at a publishing company, Estudios Cor, as production manager, so returning, but not as an author, to the world of letters I had left some years before. Jose Saramago Read Quote
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. Jose Saramago Read Quote
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. Jose Saramago Read Quote
