Watching a movie from beginning to end is like reading, because even though what you see are images, they are telling you a story

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.

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

A good smoker, like a good lover, always takes his time with a cigar.

My mother had been educated at a convent, and she had been converted to communism by my father during Stalin's most rampant period, at the beginning of the 1930s. So she had two gods, God in heaven and god on earth.

I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels

Many of my books have begun with the title, because naming a work already in progress makes no sense to me.