Guillermo Cabrera Infante Quotes

I've always thought of the book as a visual art form, and it should represent a single artistic idea, which it does if you write your own material.

I love making up visual works of art in language. I get to be an artist without actually being an artist in that sense.

I want to make books. I want to take pictures and then write all over the pictures. And then I don't have to say a complete story, because I have the picture, and I have just a word.

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different.

A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season.

The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.

This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.

I had always wanted to include images in a novel, and with my first book, 'Telex From Cuba,' I made an elaborate website that is basically all images.

A novel - it's also a way of attacking subjects that you cannot confront in the eye.

Film is the only art form where we feel we have to title our stuff literally. Musicians don't have to title their songs literally. It can be more about what's conjured up when you think of a word.

It began in images and it ended in symbolism.

I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.

As an object itself, to me, books today are such a rare entity - I want mine to be something where, if left on the kitchen table, a child could pick it up. It can visually tell a story.

I don't feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It's good to have respect for a poet.

I like looking at a book and asking myself, 'How do I replicate that experience I just had as a reader?'

Actually, I'm working on a book of poetry.

I read poetry every day. I look at it as an exercise, a kind of T'ai Chi for writers. It teaches economy of form.

Writing a screenplay is so spare, it kind of reminded me that I really should celebrate what I can do in a book, which is description: for example, places, people, locations.

Storytelling is powerful; film particularly. We can know a lot of things intellectually, but humans really live on storytelling. Primarily with ourselves; we're all stories of our own narrative.

A novel is 400 pages; it's an endurance race. There's no artist, so I have to describe everything. It's all prose. Whereas with comics, I can rely on the artist. It's really wonderful to have that collaboration and to not always feel the burden of describing everything myself and also just to have someone who can paint the world.

I try to write cinematically. Let me define what I mean by that. First of all, I try to write in a visual way so that the reader can watch a movie in their head. And it keeps moving. I try to structure the stories like a screenplay may be structured.

I aspire to write like Robert Wyatt. I take a lot of inspiration from the way he writes.