I work very hard, you know, but I don't think that I'm working, because what I do pleases me so much. I write about certain things because certain things happen to me.

I don't want to finish my life not being alive. I think that is the saddest thing that can happen to a person. I want to keep living to the end.

There are so many new young poets, novelists, and playwrights who are much less politically committed than the former generations. The trend is to be totally concentrated on the literary aesthetic and to consider politics to be something dirty that shouldn't be mixed with an artistic or a literary vocation.

Today, everybody is more or less conscious of the total failure of the Cuban revolution to produce wealth, to produce a better standard of living for the Cubans. With the exception of small radical parties, Latin Americans know that it's a brutal dictatorship and the longest in Latin American history.

I was absolutely convinced that I wouldn't win the Nobel Prize. My impression was that the Nobel Prize in Literature was given to people more or less affiliated with, let's say, socialist ideas, and that was not my case.

In general, a writer would like to think that the best book that he has written is the book that he is writing, and the next book will be even better. Maybe if this is not true, it is very useful to keep the illusion alive.

Each book, for me, has been an adventure, a period of time dedicated to study, to document certain facts, to traveling, and also to fantasize and to invent.

I think that literature is something that embraces a much larger experience than politics. It's an expression of what is life, of what are all the dimensions of life. But politics is one among others.

I thought that, when I came to New York, that I would have a very life here for three months or three and a half months. And my impression is that it won't be so quiet as I wanted.

I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.