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. -Jose Saramago Death
The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others. -Jose Saramago Attitude
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 Fear
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 Positive
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 provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are. -Jose Saramago Positive
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. -Jose Saramago Travel
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 the fine for not having registered my birth at the proper legal time. -Jose Saramago Legal
It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power. -Jose Saramago Power
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. -Jose Saramago Poetry
