Mario Benedetti Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

“An intellectual's weapon is writing, but sometimes people react as if it were a firearm. A writer can do a lot to change the situation, but as far as I know, no dictatorship has fallen because of a sonnet.”

“I believe life is a parenthesis between two nothings. I'm an atheist. I believe in a personal God, which is conscience, and that's what we must be accountable to every day.”

“I think the only positive thing that came from Uruguay's 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.”