I was able to read a movie before I was able to read a book.
Watching a movie from beginning to end is like reading, because even though what you see are images, they are telling you a story.
There were influences in my life that were more important than journalism, such as comic strips and radio.
I read the Odyssey because it was the story of a man who returned home after being absent for more than twenty years and was recognized only by his dog.
I don't have any style.
I am against the notion of style in itself.
I am a writer of fragments.
I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels.
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.
I left my country because I was forced to, and I do not think that I am going to lose my language because I live in England.
I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.
I think all writing is done through memory.
I do not believe in inspiration, but I must have a title in order to work, otherwise I am lost.
I think that I've tried many times to get Cuba in my writings, especially Havana, which was once a great and fascinating city.
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.
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.
It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.
I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself.
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.
When I write, I enjoy myself so much that what is being written really needs no reader.
