Guillermo Cabrera Infante Quotes

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

Cigars must be smoked one at a time, peaceably, with all the leisure in the world. Cigarettes are of the instant, Cigars are for eternity.

I left my country because I was forced to, and I do not think that I am going to lose my language because I live in England.

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

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.

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.

A good smoker, like a good lover, always takes his time with a cigar.

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

Dialogue in fiction is always written to be read in silence. The page is the limit. Dialogue on stage and on the screen is meant to be spoken. The voice is the limit.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

I do not consider myself a Hispanic writer.

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

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

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

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.

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 the only British writer who writes in Spanish.

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.

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.

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

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 have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.

I am against the notion of style in itself.

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

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 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.

I think all writing is done through memory.