Guillermo Cabrera Infante Quotes

I wanted to write.

I think all writers are mainly writing for themselves because I believe that most writers are writing based on a need to write. But at the same time, I feel that writers are, of course, writing for their readers, too.

Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.

But, somewhere in there, I did have the thought that this really fits in with my thinking about what I wanted to do; with what has to be done by a writer in order to stay alive as a writer.

For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn't do my homework so I could write.

The whole point of writing is to have something in your gut or in your soul or in your mind that's burning to be written.

I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.

My true nature, I believe, is writing.

I don't know where I would place myself in the literary landscape. I really just write the book that I would want to read. And I put on the blinders, and I really - it is, for me, that simple.

I always counsel aspiring novelists that passion is the most important quality for a writer to possess - technique can be taught, but that relentless desire to write has to come from within.

I have been writing since I was old enough to spell. I have never considered not writing.

I have no idea why I write. The old standards are: I like to express my feelings, stretch my imagination, earn money.

The first thing you have to understand is that I was not desperate to be a writer. I was never a closet writer filing away notes in a cupboard.

I write about what haunts me, and I write the books I myself am dying to read. I love it. I can't think of anything I'd rather do.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

I didn't do any writing seriously until I was in my mid-twenties. But I've never really thought of myself as doing anything else. I've always wanted to write.

I'm not sure if I always wanted to be a writer, but I was always writing.

It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers - for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean.

I was always writing the books that I wanted to write, books that demanded to be written at the time. But, like most writers, you start off feeling your way.

I write what I'd like to read and just hope that, along the way, others might like to read them, too.

After a while, you start to realize that you should write a book you would want to read. I try to write a book I would enjoy.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.

I was one of those kids who always wrote.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm a writer who's writing books, and therefore, I don't want to die. You'd miss the end of the book wouldn't you? You can't die with an unfinished book.