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.

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity

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

I don't much believe in the idea of characters. I write with words, that is all. Whether those words are put in the mouth of this or that character does not matter to me

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

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

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