Zitat des Tages von Jose Saramago:
I presume that nobody will deny the positive aspects of the North American cultural world. These are well known to all. But these aspects do not make one forget the disastrous effects of the industrial and commercial process of 'cultural lamination' that the USA is perpetrating on the planet.
The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.
At the end of the 1950s, I started working at a publishing company, Estudios Cor, as production manager, so returning, but not as an author, to the world of letters I had left some years before.
The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins.
It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.
In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die.
Death is present every day in our lives. It's not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life.
Look what happened with the employment law in France-the law was withdrawn because the people marched in the streets. I think what we need is a global protest movement of people who won't give up.
Abstention means you stayed at home or went to the beach. By casting a blank vote, you're saying you have a political conscience but you don't agree with any of the existing parties.
Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
There are plenty of reasons not to put up with the world as it is.
I always ask two questions: How many countries have military bases in the United States? And in how many countries does the United States not have military bases?
People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it's only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich.
Americans have discovered fear.
I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.
What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?
The U.S. needs to control the Middle East, the gateway to Asia. It already has military installations in Uzbekistan.
A writer's definitive death is when no one reads his books anymore. That's the final death.
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.
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.
Can you imagine what Bush would say if someone like Hugo Chavez asked him for a little piece of land to install a military base, and he only wanted to plant a Venezuelan flag there?
The problem is that the right doesn't need any ideas to govern, but the left can't govern without ideas.
Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.
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.
We're not short of movements proclaiming that a different world is possible, but unless we can coordinate them into an international movement, capitalism just laughs at all these little organisations.
I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement.
I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it.
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.
The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO.
The attitude of insolent haughtiness is characteristic of the relationships Americans form with what is alien to them, with others.
I had no books at home. I started to frequent a public library in Lisbon. It was there, with no help except curiosity and the will to learn, that my taste for reading developed and was refined.
Beginning with adolescence, my political formation was oriented in the ideological direction of Marxism. It was natural, being that my thinking was influenced by an atmosphere of active critical resistance. That was the way it was during all of the dictatorship and up to the Revolution of 1974.
Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.
Society has to change, but the political powers we have at the moment are not enough to effect this change. The whole democratic system would have to be rethought.
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.
As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things.
