I do not write for the reader to come, but for him who is here, short of reading the text on my shoulder.

Five minutes are enough to dream a whole life, that is how relative time is.

Perfection is a polished collection of errors.

We are born sad and we die sad, but meanwhile we love bodies whose sad beauty is a miracle.

After all Death is a Symbol that there was Life.

When I have worries, fears or a love affair, I have the luck of being able to transform it into a poem.

Generosity is the only legitimate selfishness.

I think the only positive thing that came from Uruguays dictatorship was the spread of Montevideo natives around the world, and I continued writing about them from my various places of exile.

The real influence on my work was reality, that of my country and Latin America in general.

My first two books did nada. I ended up paying the publishers.

La verdad, es que en el fondo soy un fatalista. Si a uno le llega la hora, da lo mismo un Boeing que la puntual maceta que se derrumba sobre uno desde un séptimo piso

...People - the ones who are left behind - desire answers. Even when we are advised from beyond the grave not to pursue them.

Remember that life's big changes rarely give advance warning.

A brilliant treatment of the history of Purgatory in England and its survivals and echoes throughout Shakespeare's plays, above all Hamlet.

The ultimate judgment of a work of art, whether it be a masterpiece or a lesser event, must be solely in terms of its artistic success and not on Freudian guesswork.

To an American writer, I should think it must be a flattering distinction to escape the admiration of the newspapers.

It is kind of tedious after a while, to parse politicians doing the same thing over and over again. The facts change from week to week, but the sort of masquerade doesn't.

I still write poetry from time to time, but my whole life is so music-oriented at this point that it's hard for me to even think about having other hobbies.

We have so committed ourselves in different ways that we have hardly any time for self-reflection, to observe, to study.

Changing your attitude from self-centerdness to understanding requires desire and commitment to always try to see things from the other persons point of view.

Mastery is not measured by the number of terrible things you eliminate from your life, but by the number of times you eliminate calling them terrible.