Quotes from 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Puns are a form of humor with words.

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

I am a writer of fragments.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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