Cuba was fantastic, at least just in terms of... Not to romanticize or glorify it, but just seeing a place that had not really been touched by the hand of American capitalism. Because it's a genuinely different place. A lot of times when you travel, things start to feel the same from place to place to place, because the same people own everything all around the world.
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it
For a writer you have to be interested in different cultures, different backgrounds. You are not there to write only about your village. You're there to show a bit of your village, but also to understand other villages.
Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different
You must know that there are different tastes. There are also different powers of digestion... different temperaments... differences in the capacity to comprehend.
No matter who you are, no matter what your culture is, it is absolutely possible to look out and extend yourself in such a way, that you can connect to other people and find that we are more alike than we are different.