
Interview with Katherine Vaz, José Saramago http://bombsite.com/issues/999/articles/3565, BOMB Magazine, June 2001.
Introduction to The Story of the Stone, Vol. 1: 'The Golden Days' (1973), p. 46
Preface to The Golden Days, 1973
Interview with Katherine Vaz, José Saramago http://bombsite.com/issues/999/articles/3565, BOMB Magazine, June 2001.
“I have learned a great deal from novels. Some of it is even true.”
Variant translation by Pearl S. Buck: "Alas, I was born to die! How can I know what those who come after me and read my book will think of it? I cannot even know what I myself, born into another incarnation, will think of it. I do not even know if I myself afterwards can even read this book. Why therefore should I care?" (All Men are Brothers, 1933; p. xiii)
Preface to Water Margin
“I like shape very much. A novel has to have shape, and life doesn't have any.”
Source: Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography
Edie : American Girl (1982)
Context: Everything that happened to me has been a paradox for life. The very things that I should have done would have been the trap. The very things I might have given into, that demanded, that said, this is your life. I mean, this is your only way to survive, are the things I found hardest to end. 'Cause I believed in something else. You have to work like mad to make people understand... Even if I don't make it, you know, I really insist on believing, and then I fall off the edge because there's nobody else to follow it. And I would just fall off the edge.
Quote from Berthe's Morisot's letter, 1887 - after the death of her husband Eugène Manet
1881 - 1895
Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1939/sep/03/prime-ministers-announcement in the House of Commons (3 September 1939) announcing war with Germany
Prime Minister