I think all writing is done through memory

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.

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.

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.

Do you know why the rich get richer? It’s is because they spend time with other rich people.

Death was like an unpleasant neighbor. You didn’t talk about him for fear he might hear you and decide to pay a visit.

Garlicky chicken is the best breakfast in the world.

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

I work hard and I don't come from a rich family.

Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.

It turned out to be impossible for me to 'run away' in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement at all was taken for progress in my family.

We had many more points of agreement than we had points of difference, but we did differ, and the bigger we got, the more insistent we got that each one of us should have his way.

Elvis was the king. No doubt about it. People like myself, Mick Jagger and all the others only followed in his footsteps.

Don't attribute mishaps to a lapse in concentration - if you missed the note you don't know it.