Time & Perspective Quote by Jose Saramago

Desperation is doing double duty here: it is the crisis and the alibi. Saramago frames his turn to literature not as a romantic calling but as a hard-nosed audit, triggered by the blunt fact of unemployment. The line’s dry wit comes from its inversion of the usual writer-myth. He doesn’t “follow his dream”; he runs out of options and, almost clinically, decides to test his market value as a human being who can write.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of how talent gets “discovered” in the modern economy: not by patronage or epiphany, but by the collapse of conventional work. “Without the faintest possibility” is a bruising phrase, exaggeration used as truth-telling. It signals a world where dignity is tethered to employability, and the absence of a job becomes a kind of social erasure. Writing, in that context, is both rebellion and survival strategy.

“It was about time” sharpens the edge. There’s impatience with himself, yes, but also with the system that delays artistic risk until failure forces it. Saramago, who came from working-class origins and had a late-blooming literary career, compresses a whole biography of postponed ambition into a single shrugging sentence. The genius of the quote is that it refuses the comforting narrative that art sits above economics. He admits the economic trigger, then dares literature to deliver a verdict: what am I worth, really, when all the other measures of worth have collapsed?