I'm Cuban and I always will be.

Pitching in the Olympic Games, Pan Am Games and Central American games prepared me to pitch at the big-league level.

The day I pitch, I feel confident I can stop the other team.

Sometimes I just stand on the beach and look at the water, and Cuba feels so close it's unbelievable.

Don Cooper is an incredible person. He's not only a great pitching coach, but he's a great human being and a great friend.

It's amazing how everything here seems like it's in abundance. In Cuba, there is a shortage of everything.

I'm terribly afraid of failure. When your identity is wrapped up in writing and you've written something that doesn't work, it's a tough pill to swallow.

I'll know when the ideas aren't fresh anymore. And I'll know when writing doesn't give me a thrill anymore.

People go to the movies to see things they haven’t seen before. Call me a radical.

Arrow-swift the present sweepeth, and motionless forever stands the past.

My father was a pedant and a bully who cared about nobody, and I was not to see him until I was eighteen.

There are certain truths so true that they are practically unbelievable.

The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable.

The mile has a classic symmetry....It's a play in four acts.

Amid the sufferings of life on earth, suicide is God's best gift to man.

I'm obsessed with crocodiles and getting eaten by one. When I hear that someone's been eaten by a crocodile or shark, I just get all gooey. I start salivating.