Jose Saramago

A writer's definitive death is when no one reads his books anymore. That's the final death.

When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day.

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.

I believe myself to be the type of person who does not complicate his life. I have always lived my life without dramatizing things, whether the good things that have happened to me or the bad. I simply live those moments.

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

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 human being is a being who is constantly 'under construction,' but also, in a parallel fashion, always in a state of constant destruction.

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.

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.

In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die.

Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.

Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying you have a political conscience but you don't agree with any of the existing parties.

Americans have discovered fear.

As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things.

Can you imagine what Bush would say if someone like Hugo Chavez asked him for a little piece of land to install a military base, and he only wanted to plant a Venezuelan flag there?

I always ask two questions: How many countries have military bases in the United States? And in how many countries does the United States not have military bases?

I am not a prophet.

I am the same person I was before receiving the Nobel Prize. I work with the same regularity, I have not modified my habits, I have the same friends.

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.

I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it.