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"The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers."
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"I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr."
"Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth."
"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant."
"I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'"
"In our Impulsive nature to write and repulsive nature to read that has led to a decline in literary genius in our times!"
"You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women."
"I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world."
"Individuals often turn to poetry, not only to glean strength and perspective from the words of others, but to give birth to their own poetic voices and to hold history accountable for the catastrophes rearranging their lives."
"Fictional people are people, too, otherwise why would we care what happens to them?"
"..holding a book but reading the empty spaces."
Explore more quotes by Jose Saramago
"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."
"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."
"Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer."
"It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power."
"As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things."
"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."
"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?"
"The world is governed by institutions that are not democratic - the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO."
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