Quotes By Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

I am the only British writer who writes in Spanish.

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

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.

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.

For me, words are just words, nothing else.

Puns are a form of humor with words.

I think all writing is done through memory.

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.

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 am against the notion of style in 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.

I don't have any style.

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.