Guillermo Cabrera Infante Quotes

I don't think I could write a straight drama.

Writing is truly a creative art - putting word to a blank piece of paper and ending up with a full-fledged story rife with character and plot.

If I had to write long-form stuff with descriptions of rooms, it would be so boring for me. I like writing dialogue and jokes and situational stuff.

I'm the kind of writer who thinks style is just as important as the story being told.

Eventually, I just want to write wavy little short stories.

The way that I process and make writing work is I'm really telling true stories; I'm just putting them in a cape and putting an 'S' on its chest.

Literature is the stringing together of pictures in words.

I had written a story. I wrote the story out of some desperation, really, and I didn't know I was writing a story, and it took me years. And when I finished, a friend of mine had the idea that the story should be read as a monologue in a theater.

Short fiction is like low relief. And if your story has no humor in it, then you're trying to look at something in the pitch dark. With the light of humor, it throws what you're writing into relief so that you can actually see it.

I know it may sound silly, but I think my short stories have a life and identity of their own. They crop up in all sorts of places.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

I've written fiction for as long as I can remember; it's always been my preferred form of play.

I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it.

My fiction-writing DNA shows in how I think about prose, how I think about the page, how I think nonfiction stories should work. And every piece of nonfiction I write, I want it to have fictional texture.

Good storytelling appeals to me - good writing.

I don't really set out to explore grand themes. I set out to tell a story. And one I have to be able to imagine right through.

With prose you can incorporate more details, develop scenes, sustain the tension in a special way. Prose has its own speed.

When I am writing anything in general, I just want to tell the story that exists in my head; I don't try to write a parable or make a point.

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

If you're a writer, you know that the stories don't come to you - you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that's where the stories were.

A writer should bury his thoughts deep and convey them through the characters in his novel.

I think I'd be pretty easy to write for.

As a writer, my main objective is to tell the story urgently - as if whispering it into one ear - and to know the characters intimately.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it.