I'm a very interior person. I love silence. I revel in it. I'm happy that way.

I am occasionally enraptured by Western landscape. But I don't identify that state of mind as having to do with my own origins, having grown up in the West, although I certainly crisscrossed Nevada countless times growing up, and then as a young adult, in cars and on motorcycles.

A lot of politics in art is just institutional critique, which, in my opinion, is not all that political.

I guess I'm not really fond of just chit-chatting. I want to learn something and have an experience.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

I begin a book with imagery, more than I do with an idea or a character. Some kind of poetic image.

My mother told me many stories about her childhood in Cuba. Living there had a profound impact on her and how she regards herself.

One of the strategies for doing first-person is to make the narrator very knowing, so that the reader is with somebody who has a take on everything they observe.

I don't start with a list of historical scenes that I want to include in the book. At a certain point, the narrative totally takes over, and everything that I include I can only incorporate if it answers to the internal terms of the novel.

The great thing about writing is that it has to work without that invisible layer of the reader's added knowledge.

Like most writers, I've read a lot of Hemingway, and I admire him greatly.

I spent a huge amount of time by myself. I daydreamed and learned how to be alone and not be lonely.

There were people in Cuba who truly had substantial things to gain from revolution. There were people who had things to lose in the revolution. I think they're all allowed to have their memories of what happened.

If a writer is always trying to keep a narrator emitting a tone of complete knowingness, it can become false.

Proust is a huge author for me.

Telluride has an incredible history and reputation, and I've long known of it as a unique entity that makes a place for writers - one more aspect of this exceptional film festival in the Colorado Alps.

I have spent a lot of time in the art world, and I guess I do listen to how people speak. I'm interested in what they say and how they say it.

I have crashed on a motorcycle that was going at 140mph, so I know what it feels like.

I shy away from plot structure that depends on the characters behaving in ways that are going to eventually be explained by their childhood, or by some recent trauma or event. People are incredibly complicated. Who knows why they are the way they are?

It's a cliche, and in a way it's a conservative idea about fiction, but I did learn the hard way that plot does need to dictate the story.

I don't believe that intelligence can be reduced to a number, frankly. But I can see how doing exactly that produces a useful sorting mechanism in our society in order to separate children into categories of promising and doomed. The tests seem arbitrary and without real scientific value and yet have lasting consequences.

It's no secret that Cuba is a typical Latin American culture in that it has a fair amount of homophobia. Homosexuals have been notoriously persecuted under Fidel's government.

'Blood Meridian' was without question the novel that made me want to become a writer.

I spent ten years riding motorcycles.