Guillermo Cabrera Infante Quotes

• Talking all the time and telling jokes or gossiping all the time and always and also philosophizing or aestheticizing or moralizing, but always: the thing was to make it look like we didn’t have to work because in  Havana, Cuba, this is the only way to be high society. . .

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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• 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.

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

• 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.

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

• 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.

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

• 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.

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

• 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.

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

• 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.

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

• 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.

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

• 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.

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

• 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.

  Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Guillermo Cabrera Infante (49)

Birth:	22nd April, 1929
Death:	21st February, 2005
Nationality:	Cuban
Profession:	Critic, Essayist, Novelist, Screenwriter, Translator

About

Guillermo Cabrera Infante was a Cuban novelist, essayist, translator, screenwriter, and critic; in the 1950s he used the pseudonym G. Caín. A one-time supporter of the Castro regime, Cabrera Infante went into exile to London in 1965. He is best known for the novel Tres Tristes Tigres, which has been compared favorably to James Joyce's Ulysses.

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