Guillermo Cabrera Infante Quotes About Literature
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I think that I've tried many times to get Cuba in my writings, especially Havana, which was once a great and fascinating city.
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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
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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
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For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.
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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.
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But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that
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I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels
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The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.
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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.
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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
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Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread
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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.
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I am the only British writer who writes in Spanish
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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.
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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.
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I do not believe in inspiration, but I must have a title in order to work, otherwise I am lost
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American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter
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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.
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Watching a movie from beginning to end is like reading, because even though what you see are images, they are telling you a story
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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.
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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
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For me, words are just words, nothing else
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My parents were founders of the Cuban Communist Party, and I grew up extremely poor.
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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.
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No, absolutely not, writing doesn't have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking.
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Titles are not only important, they are essential for me. I cannot write without a title
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I was never a true journalist, I was a movie critic.
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When I write, I enjoy myself so much that what is being written really needs no reader
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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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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
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Guillermo Cabrera Infante
- Born: April 22, 1929
- Died: February 21, 2005
- Occupation: Novelist
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