Guillermo Cabrera Infante quotes

My parents were founders of the Cuban Communist Party, and I grew up extremely poor. (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. View quote
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter. View quote
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
No, absolutely not, writing doesn't have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
I am a writer of fragments. View quote
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
I do not consider myself a Hispanic writer. View quote
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters. (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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Puns are a form of humor with words. View quote
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
There were influences in my life that were more important than journalism, such as comic strips and radio. View quote
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
I was never a true journalist, I was a movie critic. View quote
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. View quote
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Many of my books have begun with the title, because naming a work already in progress makes no sense to me. View quote
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. View quote
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)
For me, words are just words, nothing else. View quote
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. View quote
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
So I do not consider myself a chronicler of my fatherland or even a chronicler of Havana. View quote
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. View quote
Guillermo Cabrera Infante