José Saramago Quotes

Portuguese novelist (1922–2010)

José de Sousa Saramago, GColSE (16 November 1922 – 18 June 2010) was a Portuguese novelist, poet, playwright and journalist. In 1995, he won the Camões Prize, and in 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Alternative Names: Jose Saramago

From Wikidata (CC0)

A writer is a man like any other: he dreams. And my dream was to be able to say of this book, when I finished: 'This is a book about Alentejo'.

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.

No religion, without exception, will ever serve to bring men together and reconcile them. They have been and will continue to be a cause of unspeakable sufferings, of carnage, or monstrous physical and spiritual acts of violence that constitute one of the darkest chapters in human history.

Le religioni, tutte, senza eccezione, non serviranno mai per avvicinare e riconciliare gli uomini e, al contrario, sono state e continuano a essere causa di sofferenze inenarrabili, di stragi, di mostruose violenze fisiche e spirituali che costituiscono uno dei più tenebrosi capitoli della misera storia umana.

God is the silence of the universe, and man is the cry that gives meaning to that silence.

Deus é o silêncio do universo, e o homem o grito que dá um sentido a esse silêncio.

I was already at the twentieth section of the book and not very happy with it, when I realised how it could be written. I saw that I would only be able to write it if I did so as if I were actually telling the story. That could not be done by putting so-called oral language into writing, because that's impossible, but by introducing into my writing a mechanism of apparent spontaneity, apparent digression and apparent disorganisation in the discourse. I say 'apparent' since I am only too aware of how much work it took to ensure that it turned out like that.

...eu já estava na vigésima parte do livro, triste, quando senti que o livro podia ser escrito. Percebi que só seria capaz de escrevê-lo se o fizesse como se contasse. Não passando para a escrita o chamado discurso oral, porque isso é impossível, mas introduzindo na escrita um me-canismo de aparente prolixidade, aparente desor-ganização do discurso. Digo aparente porque sei o trabalho que me deu fazer de conta que era tudo assim.