Not chance of birth or place has made us friends, Being oftentimes of different tongues and nations, But the endeavor for the selfsame ends, With the same hopes, and fears, and aspirations.
We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and there's no altering that.
The proper way to create friends is to have a warm heart, not simply money or power. The friend of power and the friend of money are something different.
The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.
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.
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.