Quotes By Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I do not consider myself a Hispanic writer.

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.

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

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.

I am a writer of fragments.

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 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.

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

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.

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