On fighting against didactic intentions: “I've spent a large part of my life trying to sit on it, to keep it down . . . I think the struggle with it may have brought a certain kind of objectivity into my work.”

“I wouldn’t say that I dislike the young. I’m simply not a fan of naïveté.”

On writer’s block: “If an electrician said, I have electrician's block. . . . He would be committed. One thing would be certain, and that is that his paralysis in the face of his work would have only to do with him, and not with his craft.”

“You really can’t write unless you read. You have to know what the game is all about.”

 Castro’s death has renewed an open, vibrant, and sometimes heated debate about his regime and its treatment of Cuban citizens. Twenty years ago, in the aftermath of the Cold War, much less was known in the U.S.—these were not things the America…