We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.
Many small people, in small places, doing small things can change the world.
I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.
Scientists say that human beings are made of atoms, but a little bird told me that we are also made of stories
Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer; it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away. As much as I may walk, I'll never reach it. So what's the point of utopia? The point is this: to keep walking.
The Church says: the body is a sin. Science says: the body is a machine. Advertising says: The body is a business. The Body says: I am a fiesta.
The big bankers of the world, who practise the terrorism of money, are more powerful than kings and field marshals, even more than the Pope of Rome himself. They never dirty their hands. They kill no-one: they limit themselves to applauding the show.
Celebration of the Human Voice--- When it is genuine, when it is born of the need to speak, no one can stop the human voice. When denied a mouth, it speaks with the hands or the eyes, or the pores, or anything at all. Because every single one of us has something to say to the others, something that deserves to be celebrated or forgiven by others.
I am not particularly interested in saving time; I prefer to enjoy it.
In his life, a man can change wives, political parties or religions but he cannot change his favourite soccer team.
Most of wars or military coups or invasions are done in the name of democracy against democracy.
My language is a feel-thinking language, feeling and thinking at once, that is why it is a celebration of life, and at once it is a denunciation of everything that is not allowed in life to be real life, it's plenitude.
No history is mute. No matter how much they own it, break it, and lie about it, human history refuses to shut its mouth. Despite deafness and ignorance, the time that was continues to tick inside the time that is.
The human rainbow had been mutilated by machismo, racism, militarism and a lot of other isms, who have been terribly killing our greatness, our possible greatness, our possible beauty.
Chaplin and Keaton are still the best.
They know that there is nothing more serious than laughter, an art demanding infinite work, and that as long as the world revolves, making others laugh is the most splendid of activities.
It's a huge honour to wear No 7 at Liverpool.
I think about the legends: Dalglish, Keegan and that Australian guy.
I lost my balance, making my body unstable and falling on top of my opponent.
At that moment I hit my face against the player leaving a small bruise on my cheek and a strong pain in my teeth.
I'm not asking you to describe the rain falling the night the archangel arrived;
I'm demanding that you get me wet. Make up your mind, Mr. Writer, and for once in your life be the flower that smells rather than the chronicler of the aroma. There's not much pleasure in writing what you live. The challenge is to live what you write.
Our effectiveness depends on our capacity to be audacious and astute, clear and appealing. I would hope that we can create a language more fearless and beautiful than that used by conformist writers to greet the twilight.
I swear on my children's lives that I never look at the statistics or look at beating anyone's records. All I do is look to improve but not compete against any record. I want to win trophies and score goals because that's my job as a forward.
In the struggle of good against evil, it's always the people who get killed.
I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity.
Indignation must always be the answer to indignity. Reality is not destiny.
I'd have to say I enjoy myself a lot more, really.
I don't feel so much responsibility as I did in other teams. It felt sometimes at Ajax and Liverpool that it had to be me. Now, every time I go out on to the pitch, I enjoy myself and laugh. I have gone through too many difficult times in my career and I don't want to keep thinking about them.
Unlike solidarity, which is horizontal and takes place between equals, charity is top-down, humiliating those who receive it and never challenging the implicit power relations.
If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn't we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?
I'm a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia.
An intellectuals 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.
In Latin America the border between soccer and politics is vague.
There is a long list of governments that have fallen or been overthrown after the defeat of the national team.
Always in all my books I'm trying to reveal or help to reveal the hidden greatness of the small, of the little, of the unknown - and the pettiness of the big.
When I have worries, fears or a love affair, I have the luck of being able to transform it into a poem.
You just can't believe how quickly things happen in football and the way life turns. I went from being the bad guy, the worst player who gets all the criticism, to being the player who makes the difference and scores the important goals.
I never told you this but I always thought the club should have recognised you far more when you retired. For the career that you had, one of Liverpool's greatest players, you should have had a much bigger and better send-off in your final match. That's just what I felt.
Utopia lies at the horizon. When I draw nearer by two steps, it retreats two steps. If I proceed ten steps forward, it swiftly slips ten steps ahead. No matter how far I go, I can never reach it. What, then, is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance.
I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: 'A pretty move, for the love of God.' And when good soccer happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don't give a damn which team or country performs it.
You don't realize all the things you have in this world, much more than you need, and you do much less than you can.
The fiesta of soccer, a feast for the legs that play and the eyes that watch, is much more than a big business run by overlords from Switzerland. The most popular sport in the world wants to serve the people who embrace it.
My desire at Liverpool was to help get the club playing in the elite because they had been five years without it. We used to talk about it in the dressing room. If Liverpool are not in the Champions League, it is difficult to get the best players to come to the club.
Gabriel Batistuta. He was a spectacular No 9 - great at finding space, shooting from outside the box, good in the air. He was always a reference for me and I used to watch the way he played.
In the Premier League you never really know what is going to happen.
There is very little between the teams.
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.
If the grape is made of wine, then perhaps we are the words that tell who we are
Writing is a marvelous adventure and very labor-intensive: those words run away and try to escape. They are very difficult to capture.
To narrate is to give oneself: it seems obvious that literature, as an effort to communicate fully, will continue to be blocked so long as misery and illiteracy exist, and so long as the possessors of power continue to carry on with impunity their policy of collective imbecilization through the mass media.
I play only classical music. My pianos are my only big indulgence, but they're a necessity. When I'm playing the piano is literally the only time I can be completely abstract and disconnected from the regular world and yet be connected - to my music.
At first I didn't think I was going to fit into Barcelona's way of playing.
There was a lot of tiki-taka and I was thinking that without a lot of space to play in, I'd find it more difficult. I worried about that.
I've got a magnificent relationship with Leo (Messi) and Ney (Neymar).
They drive the team, with Andres Iniesta as well - what a player. You know if you have a good relationship with them off the pitch it will be that way on the pitch too. They took it as a sign that I had come to help them, not to compete with them.
Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others;
our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others - the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.
Death has an opposite, but the opposite is not mere living.
It is not courage or faith or human will. The opposite of death is love. How had I missed that? How does anyone miss that? Love is our only weapon. Only love can turn mere life into a miracle, and draw precious meaning from suffering and fear
Because of my medical and ideological training, I am accustomed to saying that life is adaptation and symbiosis.