José Saramago Quotes

Within us there is something that has no name, and that is what we really are.

I do not write to please, nor to displease. I write to unsettle.

If literature could change the world, it would have already done so.

Disagreeing is one of the rights missing from the Declaration of Human Rights.

I think that we are all blind. We are blind people who can see, but do not look.

History is written from the point of view of the victors; the vanquished have never written history. It is inevitably written from a male point of view.

She did not find an answer, answers do not always come when one needs them; often, waiting is the only possible answer.

We do nothing more in life than search for the place to stay forever.

The sad truth is that youth doesn't know what it can, and old age can't do what it knows.

The world is becoming a cave just like Plato's: everyone looking at images and believing they are reality.

(...) because life laughs at predictions and puts words where we imagined silences, and sudden returns when we thought we would never meet again.

Ultimately, it must be acknowledged that history is not selective; it is also discriminatory, taking from life what interests it as socially accepted material as historical and disregarding the rest, precisely where the true explanation of the facts, of things, of the damn reality could perhaps be found. Truly I tell you, truly I say that it is better to be a novelist, a fiction writer, a liar.