Guillermo Cabrera Infante

“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.”

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

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

“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 was an avid radio fan when I was a boy, as well as a great lover of comic strips.”

“I was able to read a movie before I was able to read a book.”

“I think all writing is done through memory.”

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

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

“American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.”

“For me, words are just words, nothing else.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“I am a writer of fragments.”

“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.”

“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 have any style.”