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.

A good smoker, like a good lover, always takes his time with a cigar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing for me, even what you call serious writing, is play.

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

We grew up learning to cheer on the underdog because we see ourselves in them.

Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

Stop being an adrenaline junkie who is waiting for the happy ending instead of seeing the happy being.

Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America-more than six million-than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields.

What would I have done if I wasn't an actor? Probably rob banks.

I could always live in my art but never in my life

You should never try to make a record and say it's for the radio, you should just make it, and then if it happens to be that, that's what it happens to be.

Though old the thought and oft exprest, Tis his at last who says it best.

God is the ultimate philosophical questioner, the one who asks the logically paradoxical ultimate philosophical question about the nature of his own existence.