Generosity is the only legitimate selfishness.

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.

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.

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

I'm not angry, I'm not an angry person, but I do sometimes like playing with the perception of anger, as in pretending that I'm more angry than I actually am, and sometimes it works quite well.

Radical surgery is never fun.

It took a little time to get where I wanted. It took a little time to get free. It took a little time to be honest. It took a little time to be me.

When the will is enslaved to a desire, it will in turn enslave the mind.

Think you have nine lives, do you? I saved you once.... don't make me save you again.

To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves is the cross and bitterness of life. It is the secret of that sad and melancholy smile on the lips of great men which so few understand.

Half the misery of human life might be extinguished if men would alleviate the general curse they lie under by mutual offices of compassion, benevolence, and humanity.

And I’m drawn to failure. I often write about it, and I’m sympathetic with it, I think, because I feel I’m contending with it constantly in my own life.

For the Lakota there was no wilderness. Nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly.

The privileged man, whether he be privileged politically or economically, is a man depraved in intellect and heart.