I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself.
American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.
You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that.
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.
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.
There were influences in my life that were more important than journalism, such as comic strips and radio.
I was an avid radio fan when I was a boy, as well as a great lover of comic strips.
My parents were founders of the Cuban Communist Party, and I grew up extremely poor.
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.
So I do not consider myself a chronicler of my fatherland or even a chronicler of Havana.
I think that I've tried many times to get Cuba in my writings, especially Havana, which was once a great and fascinating city.
No, absolutely not, writing doesn't have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking.
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.
Puns are a form of humor with words.
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.
