I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself

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.

Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another.

Those who think all religions are the same look at the wrappings instead of the content.

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.

Men ask the way to Cold Mountain, Cold Mountain: there's no through trail.

Chronology, so the saying goes, is the last refuge of the feeble-minded and the only resort for historians.

When I'm in the studio, there are no boundaries.

I'm all in favor of the president tweeting.

People who avoid all criticism fail. It's destructive criticism we need to avoid, not criticism in all forms.

On a train, why do I always end up sitting next to the woman who's eating the individual fruit pie by sucking the filling out through the hole in the middle?