 Puns are a form of humor with words. |
| I think that I've tried many times to get Cuba in my writings, especially Havana, which was once a great and fascinating city. |
| I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels. |
| For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page. |
| 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. |
| The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter. |
| I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself. |
| 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 of numbers, and there is even a page which is a mirror. |
| I was able to read a movie before I was able to read a book. |
| I am a writer of fragments. |
| Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread. |
| I think writers rush in where everybody is very frightened to tread. |
| My parents were founders of the Cuban Communist Party, and I grew up extremely poor. |
| 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 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 think all writing is done through memory. |
