My parents were founders of the Cuban Communist Party, and I grew up extremely poor.

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.

Change comes about when you become what you are, not when you try to become what you are not.

The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.

Yes, 1960’s North American sitcoms have led me to study the United States 1920’s and 1930’s crime bosses— QET Jenkins

It’s alright. It’s okay if it’s about your ego. Sometimes it’s got to be about your ego. Just know that it is.

For one thing, I like to walk when I play golf. Now I don't walk the whole way, but I try not to be the driver when in a cart.

No compression or as little as possible - that's how you get a good recording.

I probably get strangers coming up to me two or three times a week to just say something nice.

The thing is, we've changed our style but we've never changed the actual roots of what we've done.

The important thing is to make a different world, to make a world that is not now. A real world, a genuine world, but one that allows myth to live. The myth is everything.

Ideology today is unfreedom which you sincerely personally experience as freedom.