Guillermo Cabrera Infante Quotes

I'm writing what comes into my head, or through me, or from somewhere else, and it is the most extraordinary, exciting thing. I love it, and I'm very greedy, and I really enjoy it!

I like to write about the things I care about. It's no fun to sing about things you don't like.

You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.

If you're actually allowing your creative part to control your writing rather than a more commercial instinct or motive, then you'll find that all sorts of interesting things will bubble up to the surface.

Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

I just write the books that I think I would want to read.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

You want the book to be special, and they are not always going to be special, but at least you want that to be the ambition. So the only way that happens is if you are not pressing to write a book.

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.

No, it's not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.

I just try to make the best music that I can. People are going to label it whatever they're going to label it.

I write what I write.

I don't write anything if I'm not agreeable and liking it. I'm not one of these slavers who wads up paper. It comes or it doesn't.

I don't really write for an audience. I just write what the subject seems to me to require.

When I write, I don't think about messages for my readers.

I haven't read a book in a very, very long time because, when I'm writing, I don't like to see other people's work. I don't want to see something great and not be able to use it, and I don't want to have any subconscious influences.

Of course, I write. I have stories to tell. But I don't want to do superficial stuff any more.

The music is the thing. I am not writing for critics; I don't want to become a personality.

I am not bothered with whether my characters are conventional or not. Because I am not in this for the designer labels and the autographs.

I write the best book that I can write each time.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.

I say, play your own way. Don't play what the public want - you play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing - even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.

I like to believe that I don't think of myself as a writer. I am an amateur. Back when I was teaching, I wrote when I could. Weekends were good typewriter time. Now, it's whenever I feel there's something to be put on paper. I don't care what time it is, though I always write in the notebooks at night.