Jose Saramago

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“Death is present every day in our lives. It's not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life.”

“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.”

“Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974.”

“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.”

“We're not short of movements proclaiming that a different world is possible, but unless we can coordinate them into an international movement, capitalism just laughs at all these little organisations.”

“The problem is that the right doesn't need any ideas to govern, but the left can't govern without ideas.”

“It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.”

“Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that ominous fragility that the rest of the world either already experienced or is experiencing now with terrible intensity.”

“Americans have discovered fear.”

“I don't defend the idea of universal love. It has never existed and will never exist.”

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

“I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.”

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

“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 U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan.”

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