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

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.

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.

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

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter

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

No, absolutely not, writing doesn't have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking.