The writer is someone who tears himself to pieces in order to liberate his neighbor.
Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.
A tale is born from an image, and the image extends and creates a network of meanings that are always equivocal.
How much energy is wasted in Italy in trying to write the novel that obeys all the rules. The energy might have been useful to provide us with more modest, more genuine things, that had less pretensions: short stories, memoirs, notes, testimonials, or at any rate, books that are open, without a preconceived plan.
Sometimes I try to concentrate on the story I would like to write, and I realize that what interests me is something else entirely, or, rather, not anything precise but everything that does not fit in what I ought to write.
Every morning I tell myself, 'Today has to be productive' - and then something happens that prevents me from writing.
The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him.
In 'Cosmicomics,' I came close to science fiction - I was inspired by cosmological subjects and the workings of the universe and invented a character who was a sort of witness to everything that was happening inside the solar system.
I was born in Cuba, and my parents were tropical agronomists.
Every day I tell myself that reading newspapers is a waste of time, but then... I cannot do without them. They are like a drug.
For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.
