Best quotes by Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Writing for me, even what you call serious writing, is play.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I am a writer of fragments.

I think all writing is done through memory

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

Tobacco is the opiate of the gentleman, the religion of the rich.

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

I do not consider myself a Hispanic writer.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Puns are a form of humor with words.

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 the only British writer who writes in Spanish

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

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

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

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

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

I don't have any style.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels

I am against the notion of style in itself

For me, words are just words, nothing else

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

But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter

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

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

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

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.

If the sleep of reason produces monsters, what does the sleep of unreason produce?

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

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 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