641 Quotes by José Saramago

The day before is what we bring to the day we’re actually living through, life is a matter of carrying along all those days-before just as someone might carry stones, and when we can no longer cope with the load, the work is done, the last day is the only one that is not the day before another day.

That is the dream of all novelists-that one of their characters will become ‘somebody.’

Today’s bread does not eliminate yesterday’s hunger, much less that of tomorrow.

Words that come from the heart are never spoken, they get caught in the throat and can only be read in ones’s eyes.

In the end, I am quite normal. I don’t have odd habits. I don’t dramatize. Above all, I do not romanticize the act of writing. I don’t talk about the anguish I suffer in creating. I do not have a fear of the blank page, writer’s block, all those things that we hear about writers.

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn’t know how to write essays.

Doesn’t anybody understand that killing in the name of God only makes Him a murderer?

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.

Yet human experience and the practice of communication have shown throughout the ages that definitions are an illusion, like having a speech defect and trying to say love but unable to get the word out, or, better, having a tongue in one’s head but unable to feel love.