Quotes By Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself.

Titles are not only important, they are essential for me. I cannot write without a title.

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

When I write, I enjoy myself so much that what is being written really needs no reader.

I am the only British writer who writes in Spanish.

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

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.

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

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.

Puns are a form of humor with words.

For me, words are just words, nothing else.

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 think all writing is done through memory.

Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

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

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.