I think that I've tried many times to get Cuba in my writings, especially Havana, which was once a great and fascinating city.

So I do not consider myself a chronicler of my fatherland or even a chronicler of Havana.

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.

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.

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.