I do not consider myself a Hispanic writer.

That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.

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.

The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.

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

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.

When I write, I enjoy myself so much that what is being written really needs no reader