Jose Saramago Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.

  Jose Saramago

  Book, Writing, Ifs

• 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.

  Jose Saramago

  Block, Writing, Creating

• 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.

  Jose Saramago

  Positive, Hero, Writing

  "Interview with Jose Saramago, Author of Blindness". Political Affairs Magazine Interview, www.politicalaffairs.net. March 2006.

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

  Jose Saramago

  Writing, Men, Wisest Man

  "How Characters Became the Masters and the Author Their Apprentice". Jose Saramago's Nobel lecture, www.nobelprize.org. December 7, 1998.

• Every novel is like this, desperation, a frustrated attempt to save something of the past. Except that it still has not been established whether it is the novel that prevents man from forgetting himself or the impossibility of forgetfulness that makes him write novels.

  Jose Saramago

  Writing, Past, Men

  "The History of the Siege of Lisbon" by Jose Saramago, (p. 47), 1989.

• The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write. At four o'clock in the morning, when the promise of a new day still lingered over French lands, he got up from his pallet and left for the fields, taking to pasture the half-dozen pigs whose fertility nourished him and his wife.

  Jose Saramago

  Morning, Writing, Men

  "Portuguese writer Jose Saramago, winner of 1998 Nobel, dies". www.cnn.com. June 18, 2010.

• I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work.

  Jose Saramago

  Travel, Writing, Order

  "A Writer's Progress: An Interview with Nobel Prize-Winning Portuguese Novelist José Saramago". Interview with Anna Klobucka, masshumanities.org. Spring 2002.

• 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.

  Jose Saramago

  Writing, Novelists, Essays

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

  Jose Saramago

  Writing, Secret, Ifs

• When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day.

  Jose Saramago

  Writing, Example, Novel

• 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. It is nothing more than this.

  Jose Saramago

  Jobs, Writing, Two

• I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I'm a writer, but I live in this world, and my writing doesn't exist on a separate level. And if people know who I am and read my books, well, good; that way, if I have something more to say, then everyone benefits.

  Jose Saramago

  Book, Writing, Who I Am

  "Still a street-fighting man". Interview with Stephanie Merritt, www.theguardian.com. April 30, 2006.

• People might ask me, What do you propose instead? I propose nothing. I am a mere novelist, I just write about the world as I see it. It is not my job to transform it. I cannot transform it all by myself, and I wouldn't even know how to. I limit myself to saying what I believe the world to be.

  Jose Saramago

  Jobs, Believe, Writing

• I was a good pupil at primary school: in the second class I was writing with no spelling mistakes, and the third and fourth classes were done in a single year.

  Jose Saramago

  Mistake, School, Writing

• Sometimes I say that writing a novel is the same as constructing a chair: a person must be able to sit in it, to be balanced on it. If I can produce a great chair, even better. But above all I have to make sure that it has four stable feet.

  Jose Saramago

  Writing, Feet, Able

  "Interview with Katherine Vaz". BOMB Magazine, June 2001.

• The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens.

  Jose Saramago

  Believe, Writing, Artist

  "Still a street-fighting man". Interview with Stephanie Merritt, www.theguardian.com. April 30, 2006.

• I write to try to understand, and because I have nothing better to do.

  Jose Saramago

  Writing, Trying

  "Saramago diz que escreve por não ter 'nada melhor para fazer'". www1.folha.uol.com.br. April 2, 2007.

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