The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.

I must try and break through the cliches about Latin America. Superpowers and other outsiders have fought over us for centuries in ways that have nothing to do with our problems. In reality we are all alone.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

Nobody deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make you cry.

Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.