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That is the dream of all novelists-that one of their characters will become 'somebody.'

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
Novelists
Characters
Somebody
Dream
Become
Character

More quotes by Jose Saramago

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Chaos is order yet undeciphered.
Jose Saramago
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Though I had come into the world on 16 November 1922, my official documents show that I was born two days later, on the 18th. It was thanks to this petty fraud that my family escaped from paying the fine for not having registered my birth at the proper legal time.
Jose Saramago
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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.
Jose Saramago
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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.
Jose Saramago
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A journey never ends. Only the travellers end.
Jose Saramago
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The best way to killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud.
Jose Saramago
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The wise man contents himself with what he has, until such time as he invents something better.
Jose Saramago
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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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Doesn't anybody understand that killing in the name of God only makes Him a murderer?
Jose Saramago
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The difficult thing isn't living with other people, it's understanding them.
Jose Saramago
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Dignity has no price ... when someone starts making small concessions, in the end life loses all meaning.
Jose Saramago
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What kind of world is this that can send machines to Mars and does nothing to stop the killing of a human being?
Jose Saramago
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The only miracle we can perform is to go on living, said the woman, to preserve the fragility of life from day to day, as if it were blind and did not know where to go, and perhaps it is like that, perhaps it really does not know, it placed itself in our hands, after giving us intelligence.
Jose Saramago
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A tree weeps when cut down, a dog howls when beaten, but a man matures when offended.
Jose Saramago
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No, there are three people in a marriage, there's the woman, there's the man, and there's what I call the third person, the most important, the person who is composed of the man and woman together.
Jose Saramago
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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.
Jose Saramago
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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.
Jose Saramago
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Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters...
Jose Saramago
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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.
Jose Saramago
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The wisest man I ever knew in my whole life could not read or write.
Jose Saramago