I was an avid radio fan when I was a boy, as well as a great lover of comic strips.

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

I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself.

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

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

Puns are a form of humor with words.

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

There were influences in my life that were more important than journalism, such as comic strips and radio.

Titles are not only important, they are essential for me. I cannot write without a title.

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

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.

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

When I write, the first blank page, or any blank page, means nothing to me. What means something is a page that has been filled with words.

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

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.

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.

I first came out against Castro in June 1968, fifteen months after my book had been published, and you cannot imagine how quickly a void was created around me.

I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

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.