José Saramago
Writer
Date of Birth | : | 16 Nov, 1922 |
Date of Death | : | 18 Jun, 2010 |
Place of Birth | : | Azinhaga, Portugal |
Profession | : | Writer |
Nationality | : | Portuguese |
José de Sousa Saramago GColSE GColCa was a Portuguese writer. He was the recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature for his "parables sustained by imagination, compassion, and irony [with which he] continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality." His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the theopoetic human factor. In 2003 Harold Bloom described Saramago as "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today" and in 2010 said he considers Saramago to be "a permanent part of the Western canon", while James Wood praises "the distinctive tone to his fiction because he narrates his novels as if he were someone both wise and ignorant.
More than two million copies of Saramago's books have been sold in Portugal alone and his work has been translated into 25 languages. A proponent of libertarian communism, Saramago criticized institutions such as the Catholic Church, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. An atheist, he defended love as an instrument to improve the human condition. In 1992, the Government of Portugal under Prime Minister Aníbal Cavaco Silva ordered the removal of one of his works, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, from the Ariston Prize's shortlist, claiming the work was religiously offensive. Disheartened by this political censorship of his work, Saramago went into exile on the Spanish island of Lanzarote, where he lived alongside his Spanish wife Pilar del Río until his death in 2010. Saramago was a founding member of the National Front for the Defense of Culture in Lisbon in 1992.
Quotes
Total 20 Quotes
Words that come from the heart are never spoken, they get caught in the throat and can only be read in ones's eyes.
A tree weeps when cut down, a dog howls when beaten, but a man matures when offended.
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.
The best way to killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud.
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...
We can escape from everything, but not from ourselves.
Inside us there is something that has no name, that something is what we are.
Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions. Decisions make us.
Chaos is merely order waiting to be deciphered
A journey never ends. Only the travellers end.