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
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.
One can show no greater respect than to weep for a stranger.
Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.
Words have their own hierarchy, their own protocol, their own artistic titles, their own plebeian stigmas.
The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are the subject of my novels.
...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...
A writer is a man like any other: he dreams. And my dream was to be able to say of this book, when I finished: 'This is a book about Alentejo'.
No human being can achieve all he or she desires in this life except in dreams, so good night all.
In a king, modesty would be a sign of weakness.
Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.
I don't doubt that a man can live perfectly well on his own, but I'm convinced that he begins to die as soon as he closes the door of his house behind him.
we would understand much more about life’s complexities if we applied ourselves to an assiduous study of its contradictions, instead of wasting time on identities and coherences, seeing as these have a duty to provide their own explanations.
all stories are like those about the creation of the universe, no one was there, no one witnessed anything, yet everyone knows what happened.
That is the dream of all novelists-that one of their characters will become 'somebody.'