641 Quotes by José Saramago

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

Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.

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.

Perfect moments, especially when they verge on the sublime have the grave disadvantage of being very short lived, which in fact, being obvious, we would not need to mention were it not that they have a still greater disadvantage, which is that we do not know what to do once they are over.

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

Somewhere in the infinite that He occupies, God advances and withdraws the pawns of the other games He plays, but it is too soon to worry about this one, all He need do for the present is allow things to take their natural course, apart from the occasional adjustment with the tip of His little finger to make sure some stray thought or action does not interfere with the harmony of destinies.

It would not be a question of censoring oneself, but of using common sense.

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

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. It is nothing more than this.