It's the birthday of the novelist José Saramago, born in the small village northeast of Lisbon, Portugal (1922). He published his first novel Land of Sin (1947) when he was twenty-four, but after writing two more novels which he considered failures, he stopped writing fiction for the next thirty years. He said, "That was maybe one of the wisest decisions of my life... I had nothing worthwhile to say."

Saramago was in his mid-fifties, unemployed, and blacklisted by the government, when he decided he had no choice but to go back to writing fiction. He went to live in one of the poorest villages in his country and wrote a novel Raised from the Ground (1980) about three generations of a peasant family.

José Saramago said, "If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life."

(from "The Writer's Almanac" on National Public Radio--NPR--in the U.S.)