Mario Benedetti — Uruguayan Novelist born on September 14, 1920, died on May 17, 2009

Mario Orlando Hardy Hamlet Brenno Benedetti Farrugia, known as Mario Benedetti, was an Uruguayan journalist, novelist, and poet as well as being an integral member of the Generación del 45. In spite of publishing more than 80 books and being published in twenty languages he was not well known in the English-speaking world, but in the Spanish-speaking world he was considered one of Latin America's most important writers from the latter half of the 20th-century... (wikipedia)

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.
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.
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.