Quote

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

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Age: 75 †
Born: 1929
Born: April 22
Died: 2005
Died: February 21
Essayist
Journalist
Linguist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Guillermo Cain
Believe
Titles
Otherwise
Inspiration
Literature
Lost
Order
Must
Work
Title

More quotes by Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Image
But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Image
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
Image
Many of my books have begun with the title, because naming a work already in progress makes no sense to me.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Image
I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Image
I don't have any style.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Image
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
Image
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.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think all writing is done through memory
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Image
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
Image
Titles are not only important, they are essential for me. I cannot write without a title
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Image
A good smoker, like a good lover, always takes his time with a cigar.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Image
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
Image
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
Image
My parents were founders of the Cuban Communist Party, and I grew up extremely poor.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If the sleep of reason produces monsters, what does the sleep of unreason produce?
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
Image
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