Mario Benedetti

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

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

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

For a while, I became an atheist; now that I'm grown up, though, I'm not hard-edged enough to be an atheist. Even though I live with a flaming atheist, I love going to temple. I love all the rituals.

Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.

If evil is inevitable, how are the wicked accountable? Nay, why do we call men wicked at all? Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable.