American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter
Titles are not only important, they are essential for me. I cannot write without a title
I don't much believe in the idea of characters. I write with words, that is all. Whether those words are put in the mouth of this or that character does not matter to me
Dialogue in fiction is always written to be read in silence. The page is the limit. Dialogue on stage and on the screen is meant to be spoken. The voice is the limit.
I have one main reader, Miriam Gomez, my wife. She reads everything I write - I have not finished writing something and she is already reading it.
I don't have any style.
There were influences in my life that were more important than journalism, such as comic strips and radio.
Well, I write in exile because I cannot return to my country, so I have no choice but to see myself as an exiled writer.
But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that
I do not believe in inspiration, but I must have a title in order to work, otherwise I am lost
For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.
My mother had been educated at a convent, and she had been converted to communism by my father during Stalin's most rampant period, at the beginning of the 1930s. So she had two gods, God in heaven and god on earth.
That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.
If you look closely, there is no book more visual than Three Trapped Tigers, in that it is filled with blank pages, dark pages, it has stars made of words, the famous magical cube made of numbers, and there is even a page which is a mirror.
I was able to read a movie before I was able to read a book
I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself
A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader
So I do not consider myself a chronicler of my fatherland or even a chronicler of Havana
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
I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels
For me, words are just words, nothing else
I am against the notion of style in itself
I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels
My parents were founders of the Cuban Communist Party, and I grew up extremely poor.
Watching a movie from beginning to end is like reading, because even though what you see are images, they are telling you a story
