Guillermo Cabrera Infante Quotes

I was born in New York, but I'm of Cuban heritage. Maybe there's a little island in my blood.

Havana is a source of great pride to the Cuban people.

It is 'where we are' that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not.

More than anything I want to be able to go back to Cuba, to have a house to visit there, to know my roots. Then, at last, I could sing for my people.

I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

I'm Cuban-American, everybody says. I have a Cuban background, Cuban blood.

For centuries, Cuba's greatest resource has been its people.

I'm Cuban. Both my parents are Cuban. My grandparents are, too. Although I have no idea where Fit comes from.

Much as I resented having to grow up in Des Moines, it gave me a real appreciation for every place in the world that's not Des Moines.

I allegedly am an outsider writer, so I write from the perspective of somebody who doesn't completely fit in. But at the same time, I can state the fact that I don't know of any good writer who is not an outsider writer.

I don't think I'm an outsider at all.

I am Cuban, my parents are Cuban, and I was not adopted.

I'm from a Cuban family, so we're used to talking really loud. You come to a Cuban restaurant anywhere in Miami, and we're practically screaming at each other.

The Cuban people have an amazingly strong and unbroken spirit.

Violet speaks Spanish and understands it. She loves Cuban food! My mom is very good at teaching her about our culture, whether it be the food or Spanish or explaining to her that she's Cuban.

I want to say almost 100% Cubans who get mad at you are Cubans who live in Miami. And they all live comfortably in Miami. They can all go online and tell you what happened to your grandfather. In Cuba, it's a totally different thing. They can't wait for you to come. They're energized. They love your music. They want to see something new.

Where you're from only matters in relation to where you are.

All autobiography is fiction.

We wait, all, for a story of us that shall reach to where we are. We listen for our own speaking; and we hear much that seems our speaking, yet makes us strange to ourselves.

I disagree that Blood Will Out is a memoir in the conventional sense. It's the story of a relationship, primarily, not an individual. The "me" in the book is a specialized version of me, the person who Clark manipulated and fooled. I could cover the same years of my life from an entirely different perspective in another book, by concentrating on my experience as a husband, say. But I was selective. I focused on my duping.

I never thought of myself as an outsider. Because outside of what? You would have to give advantage to this space where you're not, to think of it as sovereign because you're not there. I was always in the center of where I needed to be.

I was always the squarest person in the cool room, and alternatively, sometimes the weirder person at the mainstream table.

I'm a monster, you know. I'm one of the dangerous ones. No you aren't, he promised. Your one of us.

I spent so much time telling myself that this wasn't home that I started to believe it," she said carefully. "Belonging has always been tough for me." I can be your home," he said quietly. "Belong to me.