I was able to read a movie before I was able to read a book

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

That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.

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

I think that I've tried many times to get Cuba in my writings, especially Havana, which was once a great and fascinating city.

I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself

Writing for me, even what you call serious writing, is play.