Jose Saramago

Writer

1922-11-16

Quotes by Jose Saramago

• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.

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• 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.

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

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• The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.

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