Guillermo Cabrera Infante Quotes

I would never make up a character who didn't exist or an event that didn't transpire. If you're a real writer, you have other tools in your toolbox to build drama.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

In terms of fiction, I'd rather go out and have a good time than read a book about someone having a good or bad time.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

I wrote a novel. It's called 'The Middlesteins.' It's fiction. It's not a memoir. I'm not a spokesperson.

The novel has always been the form that incorporates other forms. For me, it has always been the ultimate medium.

In journalism, a fact is just a fact. But in fiction, you have to build your case. It has to be made, step by step.

The job of the novelist is to invent: to embroider, to color, to embellish, to make things up.

I don't like to use writing assignments, exercises. I think too often people get comfortable writing in that vein, but you can't go on to write a novel comprised of short writing exercises.

Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.

I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.

What I like to write about is stuff I know. I don't think I could write a novel. I don't think I have it in me to come up with those kinds of characters.

I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.

The only thing I knew about novels from a technical point of view was that they should have conflict.

In fiction, you don't invent the events. What is imaginative about it is the consciousness: how you think about the events and how you present them. And that changes the nature of everything, and that is the attraction of writing fiction.

A novel, at least for me, cannot be visualized at one time.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

I would like to write a book that wasn't so violent and weird, but I just don't think I can do that with my talent. I don't think it would come off.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.