Cigars must be smoked one at a time, peaceably, with all the leisure in the world. Cigarettes are of the instant, Cigars are for eternity.

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.

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

Well, I write in exile because I cannot return to my country, so I have no choice but to see myself as an exiled writer.

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