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.
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Quotes by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Explore 25 verified and sourced quotes attributed to Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Open any quote for its dedicated page, source details and related topics.
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Selected quotes by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
No, absolutely not, writing doesn't have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking.
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.
American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.
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.
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.
My parents were founders of the Cuban Communist Party, and I grew up extremely poor.
I think writers rush in where everybody is very frightened to tread.
Puns are a form of humor with words.
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.
I am a writer of fragments.
I don't have any style.
I was an avid radio fan when I was a boy, as well as a great lover of comic strips.
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.
I think that I've tried many times to get Cuba in my writings, especially Havana, which was once a great and fascinating city.
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.
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.
I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels.
I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself.
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.
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.
But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that.
I think all writing is done through memory.
I do not believe in inspiration, but I must have a title in order to work, otherwise I am lost.
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