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
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.
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.
. . . if there is a way for the world to be transformed for the better, it can only be done by pessimism; optimists will never change the world for the better.
... the best way of killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud.
Reading is probably another way of being in a place.
It would not be a question of censoring oneself, but of using common sense.
To continue living, we have to die. That's the story of humanity - generation after generation - that we are going to die. There's nothing dramatic about death except that one loses one's life.
I don't defend the idea of universal love. It has never existed and will never exist.
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.
The U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan.
...sleep is a skilled magician, it changes the proportions of things, the distances between them, it separates people and they're lying next to each other, brings them together and they can barely see one another...
It is difficult to understand these people who democratically take part in elections and a referendum, but are then incapable of democratically accepting the will of the people.
A writer's definitive death is when no one reads his books anymore. That's the final death.
This is how everyone has to begin, men who have never known a woman, women who have never known a man, until the day comes for the one who knows to teach the one who does not