Guillermo Cabrera Infante Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself.