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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.

Jose Saramago

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Jose Saramago
Age: 87 †
Born: 1922
Born: November 16
Died: 2010
Died: June 18
Chronicler
Diarist
Dramaturge
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico
Jose Saramago
Books
Refined
Reading
Developed
Help
Curiosity
Learn
Library
Helping
Except
Home
Taste
Book
Started
Lisbon
Public
Frequent

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The time for miracles has either passed or not come yet, besides, miracles, genuine miracles, whatever people say, are not such a good idea, if it means destroying the very order of things in order to improve them.
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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.
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Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all.
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As my cat would say, all hours are good for sleeping.
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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.
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Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.
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If we cannot live entirely like human beings, at least let us do everything in our power not to live entirely like animals.
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The sun appears in one of the upper corners of the rectangle, on the left of anyone looking at the picture.
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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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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.
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Each day is a little bit of history
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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.
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En ningún momento de la historia, en ningún lugar del planeta, las religiones han servido para que los seres humanos se acerquen unos a los otros. Por el contrario, sólo han servido para separar, para quemar, para torturar. No creo en dios, no lo necesito y además soy buena persona.
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Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions. Decisions make us.
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Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat.
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When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day.
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Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.
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There are those who deny me the right to speak of God, because I am not a believer. And I say that I have every right in the world. I want to talk about God because it is a problem that affects all humanity.
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Chaos is order yet undeciphered.
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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.
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