Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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 am the only British writer who writes in Spanish.”

“Puns are a form of humor with words.”

“I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“I am against the notion of style in itself.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”