Top 50 Guillermo Cabrera Infante Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A good smoker, like a good lover, always takes his time with a cigar.”

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

2. “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.”

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

3. “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

4. “Writing for me, even what you call serious writing, is play.”

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

5. “I am a writer of fragments.”

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

6. “I first came out against Castro in June 1968, fifteen months after my book had been published, and you cannot imagine how quickly a void was created around me.”

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

8. “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.”

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

9. “If the sleep of reason produces monsters, what does the sleep of unreason produce?”

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

10. “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

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

14. “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

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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.”

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

22. “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.”

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

25. “I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.”

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

26. “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.”

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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.”

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

34. “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.”

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

35. “I do not consider myself a Hispanic writer.”

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

38. “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.”

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

42. “I think all writing is done through memory.”

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

43. “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

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

45. “I don’t have any style.”

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

46. “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

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

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

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante

50. “Tobacco is the opiate of the gentleman, the religion of the rich.”

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante