I've never given up. I've always kept going. I don't feel that I could afford to give up. That would be the beginning of the end.

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

I never change, I simply become more myself.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

you're deluding yourself that you have some deep spiritual connection, like you didn't just read it on Wikipedia. There's a difference between tradition and culture.

It was a lie but he believed in telling lies to people. Truth telling and medicine just didn't go together except in dire emergencies, if then.

I don't know what keeps me going. Sometimes I wonder... I think it's just pure perseverance and wanting to succeed and having that burning desire to always have success.

Cubans are a people who suffered from capitalism in the cruelest way, in the social order, the economic order and the political order.

I love songs that people can dance to and enjoy at the same time.

People do bad things in their lives. And those sort of things are forgivable. That's half the point of having confession in church - you need to be able to fess up to what you've done.

Who do I belong to? How come I mortgaged my being till I don't belong to myself? How come I sold my blood? And who now owns my indecisions, my hands, my private pain, my pride?

When I was a young reporter, the great vice among journalists was whiskey. Today, it's cynicism.

When the self is ones exclusive subject and limit, reference and measure, one has no choice but to make a world of words.

We are ready to compromise. We are ready to take calculated risks, but for a peace that will give us security.