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

My parents were founders of the Cuban Communist Party, and I grew up extremely poor.

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

A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader

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.

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

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