José Saramago
José Saramago was a Portuguese writer who worked across an extensive range of literary forms, serving at various points in his career as a novelist, journalist, playwright, poet, screenwriter, translator, dramaturge, and literary critic.
Born on 16 November 1922 in Azinhaga and also associated with Golegã, Saramago composed his work in the Portuguese language. He received the Camões Prize and subsequently received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. His notable works as a novelist include Blindness, Seeing, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Death with Interruptions, The Elephant's Journey, and Cain. Alongside his fiction, his activities as a journalist, translator, screenwriter, and dramaturge reflect the breadth of his engagement with literary and cultural production.
Saramago died on 18 June 2010 in Tías, with his place of death also recorded as Lanzarote. His published novels, which include both retellings of biblical narratives such as The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Cain and works of contemporary fiction such as Blindness and Death with Interruptions, represent the primary body of work for which he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Quotes by José Saramago
José Saramago's insights on:
In order to protect the physical hygiene and mental health of the living, we usually bury the dead.
As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved it's the citizen who changes things.
Globalization is a form of totalitarianism. It is the rich who rule, and the poor live as they can.
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.
We’ve all had our moments of weakness, and if we manage to get through today without any, we’ll be sure to have some tomorrow.
No, there are three people in a marriage, there’s the woman, there’s the man, and there’s what I call the third person, the most important, the person who is composed of the man and woman together.
From literature to ecology, from the escape velocity of galaxies to the greenhouse effect, from garbage disposal methods to traffic jams, everything is discussed in our world. But the democratic system, as if it were a given fact, untouchable by nature until the end of time, we don’t discuss that.