Jose Saramago Quotes

Earthenware is like people, it needs to be well treated.

Being fired was the best luck of my life. It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.

. . . 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.

We never consider that the things dogs know about us are things of which we have not the faintest notion.

The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write.

Age carries with it a double load of guilt.

In general, fakirs, like scribes and potters, are sitting down, when he's standing up, a fakir is just like an other man, and sitting down, he'll be smaller than the others.

Lord knows why they depict death with wings when death is everywhere.

When all is said and done, what is clear is that all lives end before their time.

We live in a very peculiar world. Democracy isn't discussed, as if it was taken for granted, as if democracy had taken God's place, who is also not discussed.

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.

Just as the habit does not make the monk, the sceptre does not make the king.

Will we ever learn that certain things can be understood only if we take the trouble to trace them to their origins.

If I could repeat my childhood, I would repeat it exactly as it was, with the poverty, the cold, little food, with the flies and pigs, all that.

If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.

You know the name you were given, you do not know the name that you have

With the passage of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the color of our blood and the salt of our tears.

Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought.

We are so afraid of the idea of having to die... that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn.

We are marching against the law of the jungle that the United States and its acolytes old and new want to impose on the world.

Death has no need to be cruel, taking people's lives is more than enough.

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.

The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens.

There are plenty of reasons not to put up with the world as it is, and if the book has any kind of message, I suppose that's it.

There is nothing that is truly free nor democratic enough. Make no mistake, the internet did not come to save the world.

Ah, in every age there is always some new wonder to astound mankind until they grow accustomed to it and lose interest.

I believe that I've been asked all possible questions. I, myself, if I were a journalist, would not know what to ask me.

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

anyone who gets up early by inclination or has been forced to rise early out of necessity finds it intolerable that others should go on sleeping soundly

I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement.

Americans have discovered fear.

Chaos is order yet undeciphered.