- Pablo Neruda: When you explain poetry, it becomes banal. Better than any explanation is the experience of feelings that poetry can reveal to a nature open enough to understand it.
- Pablo Neruda: When I was a senator of the republic I went to visit the pampas, a region where it only rains once every fifty years, where life is unimaginably hard. I wanted to meet the people who had voted for me. One day at Lota there was a man who had come up from a coal mine. He was a mask of coal dust and sweat, his face contorted by terrible hardship, his eyes red from the dust. He stretched out his calloused hand and said: "Wherever you go, speak of this torment. Speak of your brother who lives underground in hell." I felt I had to write something to help man in his struggle, to write the poetry of the mistreated. That's how "Canto General" came about. Now my comrades tell me they have managed to get it published secretly in Chile and it's selling like hot cakes. That makes me very happy.
- Mario Ruoppolo: If you make this much of a fuss about one poem, you're never going to win that Nobel Prize.
- Mario Ruoppolo: I'll only ask him to sign this book. That's all, so when I get paid I'll go to Naples and show all the girls that I'm a friend of Neruda, the poet of love.
- Postmaster: The poet of the people.
- Priest: Find yourselves a decent person who isn't a communist. If Neruda doesn't believe in God, why should God believe in Neruda? What sort of witness would he be?
- Mario Ruoppolo: God never said a communist can't be a witness at a wedding. I'm not getting married then.
- Beatrice Russo: You're more interested in Neruda as a witness than me as your wife.
- Mario Ruoppolo: My darling, Neruda's a Catholic. I know he's a Catholic.
- Priest: In Russia, communists eat babies. How can he be Catholic?
- Beatrice Russo: He doesn't look the type.
- Priest: Neruda has a pretty wife. He's getting on and he has no children. How do you explain that?
- Mario Ruoppolo: So according to you, Don Pablo ate his kids?
- Priest: Who knows?