"Punctuation, he said, was like traffic signs, too much of it distracted you from the road on which you travelled"

He began, then, as he laboured over his tale of the daily grind of peasants in the vast burning plains of Portugal’s Alentejo, digging into the dry stones and gravel until their arms bled like Christ’s on the cross, to tell the story orally, marking punctuation almost wholly with commas because that was how words came out of mouths, flowing along inexorably like making music, often for pages at a time.
Punctuation, he said, was like traffic signs, too much of it distracted you from the road on which you travelled, and if you wondered, Wouldn’t writing be rather confusing without it, he would say No, it was like the constant wash and turn of the sea, sounding even more sibilant in Portuguese than in English, or like a journey taken by a traveller, every step linked to the next and every end to a beginning, or like the press of time, no sooner coming than going, never stopping in the present, which consequently never existed. In any case his novel “Levantado do Chão”, “Raised from the Soil”, marked his breakthrough, the voice that became Saramago’s, and after that he was famous.

Fundação José Saramago.