“Cuban eyes often look close to tears. Tears never seem far away because both their pain and their joy are always so close to the surface.”

“With all of the people in Cuba who I met - many of them hugely heroic figures - I found learning about their complexity and richness and contradictions just really fascinating, and it was fulfillin...”

“'What comes next?' is the constant question I'm asked by outsiders eager to travel to the island. During the eleven years I traveled to Havana, very few Cubans I met on the island ever bothered to ...”

“Las Vegas, the most expensive toilet in the world that still cant flush.”

“In Old Havana, the names of the streets before the revolution provided a glimpse into the city's state of mind. You might have known someone who lived on the corner of Soul and Bitterness, Solitude...”

“Las Vegas, the most expensive toilet in the world that still can’t flush.”

“The only person who needs to know about failure is yourself.”

“I have tried every diet to lose weight. When you restrict yourself, you're setting yourself up for failure.”

“We've all experienced those days when we feel like an absolute failure. It's a normal feeling when things don't go as exactly planned. And, when we feel like that, it's challenging to think of your...”

“There's a strength in that look, a wilfulness; one would almost call it defiance except that it is so good-humoured. It is the look a woman would wear - would have worn - if she asked a man, a stra...”

“If its reality you want, I suggest you look out the window.”

“Reality is how you look at it”

“The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.”

“There are only two ways to live your life: as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle.”

“The moral of the tale is, don't live for the approval of others. The real you is here to find out the secret of life, not to satisfy someone else's opinion.”