Quotes by 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

Love

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Wisdom

I think writers rush in where everybody is very frightened to tread.

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Wisdom

Puns are a form of humor with words.

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

I am a writer of fragments.

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Wisdom

I don't have any style.

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Wisdom

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

Success

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

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Wisdom

I think all writing is done through memory.

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Wisdom

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Success