Top 30 Guillermo Cabrera Infante Quotes

I do not consider myself a Hispanic writer.

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.

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

The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.

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

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.

Puns are a form of humor with words.

I was able to read a movie before I was able to read a book.

I don’t have any style.

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 am a writer of fragments.

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 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.

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.

I am the only British writer who writes in Spanish.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.

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

I think all writing is done through memory.

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.

Watching a movie from beginning to end is like reading, because even though what you see are images, they are telling you a story.