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.
Jose Saramago

Americans have discovered fear.
Jose Saramago

Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that ominous fragility that the rest of the world either already experienced or is experiencing now with terrible intensity.
Jose Saramago

As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved - it's the citizen who changes things.
Jose Saramago

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?
Jose Saramago

Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.
Jose Saramago

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?
Jose Saramago

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.
Jose Saramago

I am a person with leftist convictions, and always have been.
Jose Saramago

I am not a prophet.
Jose Saramago

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

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.
Jose Saramago

I can't imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement.
Jose Saramago

I do not just write, I write what I am. If there is a secret, perhaps that is it.
Jose Saramago

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

I think we are blind. Blind people who can see, but do not see.
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.
Jose Saramago

In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die.
Jose Saramago

Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
Jose Saramago

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.
Jose Saramago