GUILLERMO CABRERA INFANTE

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.

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

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 think all writing is done through memory.

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.

Puns are a form of humor with words.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.

I don't have any style.

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.

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

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

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

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 am against the notion of style in itself.

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