Guillermo Cabrera Infante quotes

Guillermo Cabrera Infante was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and screenwriter renowned for his inventive use of language. His most celebrated work, "Tres Tristes Tigres," captures the spirit and complexities of Havana's cultural life. He became an influential literary figure in exile, known for his wit and experimental style. Here are 48 of his 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.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

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

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

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

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

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 a writer of fragments.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I do not consider myself a Hispanic writer.

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.

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

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

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

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I was never a true journalist, I was a movie critic.

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

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

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

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.

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

So I do not consider myself a chronicler of my fatherland or even a chronicler of Havana.

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

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Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Guillermo Cabrera Infante - Image

Photo: Oto Vega Ponce, CC BY-SA 3.0

Occupation: Cuban Novelist
Born: April 22, 1929
Died: February 21, 2005
Quotes count: 48

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