Quotes from Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

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 am the only British writer who writes in Spanish.

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

I think all writing is done through memory.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Así que así era yo y no había quien me cambiara, porque pasaba el tiempo y me ponía viejo y los días pasaban y se convertían en fecha y los años se convertían en efemérides y yo seguía así, quedándome con las noches, metiéndolas en un vaso con hielo o en un negativo o en el recuerdo

no hay dos miradas a una mujer desnuda iguales, no hay dos desnudeces exactas, como no existe las misma ave a cazar, aunque haya sido cazada antes, escapada y vuelta a cazar en el mismo sitio, el momento las hace diferentes.

La memoria es una traductora simultánea que interpreta los recuerdos al azar o siguiendo un orden arbitrario: nadie puede manipular el recuerdo y quien crea que pueda es aquel que está más a merced del arbitrio de la memoria.

por eso detesto las masturbaciones yacentes

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.