You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that

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

What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading, a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other

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

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

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

If the sleep of reason produces monsters, what does the sleep of unreason produce?