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.

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.

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.

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

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

If man is man and God is God, to live without prayer is not merely an awful thing: it is an infinitely foolish thing.

I’m not scared of death, Dad, ” I told him. “I’m scared of not living. I don’t want to die with any regrets that I didn’t get to do the things in life that I’ve always wanted.

Sometimes it takes ten seconds to see some humor in your dilemmas, sometimes ten years.

The dream is a series of images, which are apparently contradictory and nonsensical, but arise in reality from psychologic material which yields a clear meaning.

Man only of all earthly creatures, asks, Can the dead die forever? - and the instinct that urges the question is God's answer to man, for no instinct is given in vain.

I could not undertake to form a nucleus of an institution for the development of infant minds, where none already existed. It would be too cruel.

Partisan politics has no place in the classroom.

I write and perform for the feeling it gives me, and the experience of being connected with a room full of people to the vibration of music

Knowledge without transformation is not wisdom.

True love, is the love that seduces and will never allow itself to be seduced.