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.

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...

I do not consider myself a Hispanic writer.

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.

I think that I’ve tried many times to get Cuba in my writings, especially Havana, which was once a great and fascinating city.

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.

I don’t have any style.

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

I think that like all writers – and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer – I write primarily for myself.

But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that.

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

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.

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.

I think writers rush in where everybody is very frightened to tread.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

Puns are a form of humor with words.

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.

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

I was able to read a movie before I was able to read a book.

For me, words are just words, nothing else.

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

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.

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...

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

I am a writer of fragments.

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...

I have one main reader, Miriam Gomez, my wife. She reads everything I write – I have not finished writing something and she is already reading it.

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

I am against the notion of style in itself.

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

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.

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.

I am the only British writer who writes in Spanish.

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

I left my country because I was forced to, and I do not think that I am going to lose my language because I live in England.

If you look closely, there is no book more visual than Three Trapped Tigers, in that it is filled with blank pages, dark pages, it has stars made of words, the famous magical cube made...

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.

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

I live in London and I am a British subject, although I do write in Spanish, of course.

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.

I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels.

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

I read the Odyssey because it was the story of a man who returned home after being absent for more than twenty years and was recognized only by his dog.

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

I do not believe in inspiration, but I must have a title in order to work, otherwise I am lost.

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.

I think all writing is done through memory.