Jose Saramago

Americans have discovered fear.

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

It is difficult to understand these people who democratically take part in elections and a referendum, but are then incapable of democratically accepting the will of the people.

The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others.

I don't defend the idea of universal love. It has never existed and will never exist.

I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it.

Being fired was the best luck of my life. It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.

I believe myself to be the type of person who does not complicate his life. I have always lived my life without dramatizing things, whether the good things that have happened to me or the bad. I simply live those moments.

The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write.

Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that ominous fragility that the rest of the world either already experienced or is experiencing now with terrible intensity.

In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die.

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.