Quotes By 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

I am against the notion of style in itself.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

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

I live in London and I am a British subject, although I do write in Spanish, of course.

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.

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

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.

What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading, a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other.

I do not consider myself a Hispanic writer.

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

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.

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.

I don't have any style.

I think that I've tried many times to get Cuba in my writings, especially Havana, which was once a great and fascinating city.

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

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.

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 am a writer of fragments.

I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels.

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

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.

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