Jose Saramago
Jose Saramago
José de Sousa Saramago, GColSE, was a Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the human factor. Harold Bloom described Saramago as "the greatest living novelist" and considers him to be "a permanent part of the Western canon", while James Wood praises "the distinctive tone to his fiction because he narrates his novels as if he were someone...
NationalityPortuguese
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth16 November 1922
CountryPortugal
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.
Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.
...you have to leave the island in order to see the island, that we can't see ourselves unless we become free of ourselves, Unless we escape from ourselves you mean, No, that's not the same thing.
The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.
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.
Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters.
There are such moments in life, when, in order for heaven to open, it is necessary for a door to close.
We use words to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.
What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?
...in matters of feeling and of the heart, too much is always better than too little.
Why did we become blind, I don't know, perhaps one day we'll find out, Do you want me to tell you what I think, Yes, do, I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.
Words that come from the heart are never spoken, they get caught in the throat and can only be read in ones's eyes.
It is strange how the elderly fall silent when they ought to go on speaking, obliging the young to learn everything from scratch.
Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.