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I don't think it is worth explaining how a character's nose or chin looks. It is my feeling that readers will prefer to construct, little by little, their own character—the author will do well to entrust the reader with this part of the work.

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
Little
Prefer
Chins
Wells
Reader
Construct
Well
Worth
Constructs
Looks
Feeling
Explaining
Work
Feelings
Nose
Think
Part
Noses
Thinking
Character
Readers
Entrust
Littles
Author
Chin

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The only time we can talk about death is while we're alive, not afterwards.
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We never consider that the things dogs know about us are things of which we have not the faintest notion.
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anyone who gets up early by inclination or has been forced to rise early out of necessity finds it intolerable that others should go on sleeping soundly
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I am the same person I was before receiving the Nobel Prize. I work with the same regularity, I have not modified my habits, I have the same friends.
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Every thing in life is a uniform the only time our bodies are truly in civilian dress is when we're naked.
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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.
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I am a person with leftist convictions, and always have been.
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The difficult thing isn't living with other people, it's understanding them.
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We live in a very peculiar world. Democracy isn't discussed, as if it was taken for granted, as if democracy had taken God's place, who is also not discussed.
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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.
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There are plenty of reasons not to put up with the world as it is, and if the book has any kind of message, I suppose that's it.
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A writer is a man like any other: he dreams. And my dream was to be able to say of this book, when I finished: 'This is a book about Alentejo.'
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Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.
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There are times when it is best to be content with what one has, so as not to lose everything.
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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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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.
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Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.
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but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probably, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt.
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You know the name you were given, you do not know the name that you have
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we would understand much more about life’s complexities if we applied ourselves to an assiduous study of its contradictions, instead of wasting time on identities and coherences, seeing as these have a duty to provide their own explanations.
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