So I do not consider myself a chronicler of my fatherland or even a chronicler of Havana

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity

I was never a true journalist, I was a movie critic.

But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that

Dialogue in fiction is always written to be read in silence. The page is the limit. Dialogue on stage and on the screen is meant to be spoken. The voice is the limit.

Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread

I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.