I am a Mexican. The United States lived seventy-five years with the one party system in Mexico - the PRI - without batting an eyelid, never demanding democracy of Mexico. Democracy came because Mexicans fought for democracy and made a democracy out of our history, our possibilities, our perspectives. Democracy is not something that can be exported like Coca-Cola. It has to be bred from the inside, according to the culture, the conditions of each country.

There are people whose external reality is generous because it is transparent, because you can read everything, accept everything, understand everything about them: people who carry their own sun with them.

Incredible the animal that first dreamed of another animal.

There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past.

Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a sombre graveyard of dead books.

You, yesterday, did the usual things, just as any day, You don't know if it's worth remembering. You would prefer to remember, there lying in the half-darkness of the bedroom, not what has happened already but what is going to happen. In your half-darkness your eyes would prefer to look ahead, not behind, and they do not know how to foresee the past.

Cuba needs a dose of perestroika.