Guillermo Cabrera Infante Quotes

So that when I came from Panama... my family was exiled in 1973 and they went to Miami.

If you exile a writer, however free the country he is sent to, there will always be a sense of internal constraint.

I am not in exile.

No one drives me into exile, not even the nationalists.

So I decided the only place I can speak to the world is from outside Israel.

After the 1960 royal coup, I spent time in India - including three years in prison.

I think the only positive thing that came from Uruguay's dictatorship was the spread of Montevideo natives around the world, and I continued writing about them from my various places of exile.

We live in the age of the refugee, the age of the exile.

Thousand got away to other countries; thousands returned to Spain tempted by false promises of kindness. By the tens of thousands, these Spaniards died of neglect in the concentration camps.

Since the 1960s, exile for Haitians is a condition that ends only to begin again.

Soviet regime in a way deprived me from my childhood in my homeland, because my father was in military, and after the Yalta agreement he was sent to teach in military academy in Riga, and I was born then.

… in many countries scholars are being sent into exile for racial, religious and political reasons, in increasing numbers .... It means that more and more people are growing afraid to face differences of opinion and yet it is increasingly important that throughout the world differing opinions should be listened to and weighed by the people as a whole.

My parents left Libya in 1979, escaping political repression, and settled in Cairo. I was nine.

The exile is a singular, whereas refugees tend to be thought of in the mass ... What is implied in these nuances of social standing is the respect we pay to choice. The exile appears to have made a decision, while the refugee is the very image of helplessness.

It was this feeling for a lot of my characters, who are dissidents or banned artists and writers, that they had had to fight living under so much surveillance, and then suddenly they come to America and they're like, I'm not being surveilled - I'm not even being noticed at all.

I was born in Budapest, Hungary, and moved to the United States in 1956. It was during the Hungarian Revolution when Russian tanks rolled into Budapest, and my family - me, my brother, and my parents - escaped over the border to Austria. We just took whatever we could carry. It was perilous, but we made it across.

When I first came to Columbia University, I was dirt poor. I did not choose to come here - I just ended up here because I had nowhere else to go, having just escaped from China after Tiananmen. I was in a new country where I didn't understand the language, didn't know anybody, and didn't have a penny to my name. So I was desperate and afraid.

My family had to leave Vietnam because my uncles fought alongside the Aussies.

I may write about place and displacement, but what I'm really writing about is dispersion, evasion, ambivalence: not so much a subject as a move in everything I write.

I never considered myself as somebody in exile because, different to my father who, yes, was in exile because he left Haiti as an adult, for me it was just to be somewhere else. I carried Haiti with me everywhere, but I also carried, you know, my youth in a public school in Brooklyn. It's part of who I am as well.

As a political exile, you always think you're going home next year.

What captivity has been to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish. For us, the romance of our native land begins only after we have left home; it is really only with other people that we become Irishmen.

The theme of exile is attractive to me, because it's sort of like the family business. Not just music, but travel.

There are many war refugees and three times as many climate refugees. All of them are people who can no longer live where they were born. I hope we face reality in time to save ourselves. We will all be migrants soon.

The Refugee Convention of 1951 was a major breakthrough, outlining the rights of those displaced across borders as well as the legal obligations of states to protect them.