Guillermo Cabrera Infante Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“I think writers rush in where everybody is very frightened to tread”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Thinking #Frightened

“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

#Writing #Mean #Pages

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

#Writing #Thinking #Cities

“Writing for me, even what you call serious writing, is play.”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Writing #Play #Serious

“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

#Character #Plot #Lasts

“I was able to read a movie before I was able to read a book”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Book #Able

“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

#Believe #Reading #Writing

“When I write, I enjoy myself so much that what is being written really needs no reader”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Writing #Needs #Enjoy

“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

#Magazines #Journalism #Feels

“I do not consider myself a Hispanic writer.”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Hispanic

“If the sleep of reason produces monsters, what does the sleep of unreason produce?”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Sleep #Monsters #Doe

“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.”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Friendship #Dog #Home

“So I do not consider myself a chronicler of my fatherland or even a chronicler of Havana”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Havana #Fatherland

“Puns are a form of humor with words.”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Humor #Form #Pun

“Titles are not only important, they are essential for me. I cannot write without a title”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Writing #Important #Titles

“Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Translators

“Tobacco is the opiate of the gentleman, the religion of the rich.”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Gentleman #Opiates #Rich

“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”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Believe #Writing #Character

“American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Writing #Literature #Matter

“There were influences in my life that were more important than journalism, such as comic strips and radio.”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Important #Radio #Journalism

“But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Writing #Mind #Doe

“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.”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Voice #Silence #Fiction

“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.”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Writing #Catholic #Bedtime

“A good smoker, like a good lover, always takes his time with a cigar.”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Good Love #Lovers #Cigar

“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

#Writing #Mean #Fiction

“Many of my books have begun with the title, because naming a work already in progress makes no sense to me.”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Book #Progress #Titles

“I was never a true journalist, I was a movie critic.”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Critics #Movie Critic #Journalist

“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

#Character #Peculiar #Difficult

“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.”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Reading #Writing #Wife

“I don't have any style.”
-- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

#Style