Guillermo Cabrera Infante Quotes
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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.
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I think writers rush in where everybody is very frightened to tread
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I think that I've tried many times to get Cuba in my writings, especially Havana, which was once a great and fascinating city.
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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
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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
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I am a writer of fragments.
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For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.
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I think all writing is done through memory
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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.
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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
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But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that
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If the sleep of reason produces monsters, what does the sleep of unreason produce?
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Puns are a form of humor with words.
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There were influences in my life that were more important than journalism, such as comic strips and radio.
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I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels
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I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels
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The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread
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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.
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I am the only British writer who writes in Spanish
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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.
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So I do not consider myself a chronicler of my fatherland or even a chronicler of Havana
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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.
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Many of my books have begun with the title, because naming a work already in progress makes no sense to me.
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I do not believe in inspiration, but I must have a title in order to work, otherwise I am lost
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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.
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American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter
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Guillermo Cabrera Infante
- Born: April 22, 1929
- Died: February 21, 2005
- Occupation: Novelist