Guillermo Cabrera Infante Quotes & Sayings

I first came out against Castro in June 1968, fifteen months after my book had been published, and you cannot imagine how quickly a void was created around me. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I am a writer of fragments. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

No, absolutely not, writing doesn't have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I live in London and I am a British subject, although I do write in Spanish, of course. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

A good smoker, like a good lover, always takes his time with a cigar. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I think all writing is done through memory. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Writing for me, even what you call serious writing, is play. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

If you look closely, there is no book more visual than Three Trapped Tigers, in that it is filled with blank pages, dark pages, it has stars made of words, the famous magical cube made of numbers, and there is even a page which is a mirror. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Titles are not only important, they are essential for me. I cannot write without a title. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Cigars must be smoked one at a time, peaceably, with all the leisure in the world. Cigarettes are of the instant, Cigars are for eternity. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

For me, words are just words, nothing else. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I think that I've tried many times to get Cuba in my writings, especially Havana, which was once a great and fascinating city. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Puns are a form of humor with words. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

My mother had been educated at a convent, and she had been converted to communism by my father during Stalin's most rampant period, at the beginning of the 1930s. So she had two gods, God in heaven and god on earth. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

When I write, the first blank page, or any blank page, means nothing to me. What means something is a page that has been filled with words. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

When I write, I enjoy myself so much that what is being written really needs no reader. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I was never a true journalist, I was a movie critic. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I read the Odyssey because it was the story of a man who returned home after being absent for more than twenty years and was recognized only by his dog. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I am the only British writer who writes in Spanish. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

My parents were founders of the Cuban Communist Party, and I grew up extremely poor. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I am against the notion of style in itself. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

There were influences in my life that were more important than journalism, such as comic strips and radio. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Watching a movie from beginning to end is like reading, because even though what you see are images, they are telling you a story. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Many of my books have begun with the title, because naming a work already in progress makes no sense to me. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

So I do not consider myself a chronicler of my fatherland or even a chronicler of Havana. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I do not consider myself a Hispanic writer. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I think writers rush in where everybody is very frightened to tread. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I left my country because I was forced to, and I do not think that I am going to lose my language because I live in England. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Tobacco is the opiate of the gentleman, the religion of the rich. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading, a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Well, I write in exile because I cannot return to my country, so I have no choice but to see myself as an exiled writer. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Dialogue in fiction is always written to be read in silence. The page is the limit. Dialogue on stage and on the screen is meant to be spoken. The voice is the limit. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I was able to read a movie before I was able to read a book. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I was an avid radio fan when I was a boy, as well as a great lover of comic strips. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I do not believe in inspiration, but I must have a title in order to work, otherwise I am lost. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I have one main reader, Miriam Gomez, my wife. She reads everything I write - I have not finished writing something and she is already reading it. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I don't much believe in the idea of characters. I write with words, that is all. Whether those words are put in the mouth of this or that character does not matter to me. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

If the sleep of reason produces monsters, what does the sleep of unreason produce? — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante