Guillermo Cabrera Infante Quotes

I keep writing because it is deeply pleasurable to me.

If you're writing, you're starting in private. It can really be this amazing, private, freeing experience. Forget that it's for other people - that comes in later.

I always talk to my students about the need to write for the joy of writing. I try to sort of disaggregate the acclaim from the act of writing.

There's a happiness that comes from writing that I won't live without.

A writer writes. Period. No matter if someone is buying your work or not.

I'd always liked to write, but I never wanted to be a writer, because it seemed a sissy occupation. It is. To this day, I find it terribly easy. And so, rather than trying to hunt up a text, I just wrote one.

I tend not to think about the reading public at all, or the business, when I'm writing.

I'm writing what comes into my head, or through me, or from somewhere else, and it is the most extraordinary, exciting thing. I love it, and I'm very greedy, and I really enjoy it!

I get a great high from writing.

I write for the love of writing. If I never published another book, I would still be writing stories.

I love writing. It makes me so happy.

With my designs and my ideas, I want to please myself first.

As long as it's making you happy and you're enjoying it, then you should never stop writing music. Whether it's going to take you somewhere, viewed by other people, or it's literally you in a bedroom at home, it should be something that you do for yourself.

I don't care about commercial success. I get to do what I love and communicate whatever I want.

Work for work's sake doesn't thrill me, but when I'm in the zone, I'm creative, and the expression is free.

When I write, I don't think about messages for my readers.

I don't perceive an audience at all when I write a book. It's pure self-indulgence.

I have always thought of myself as a writer, only because I need things to direct, and I can't not write the things that I direct.

It's probably simply a matter of temperament that I never stopped to wonder if I could "match" what I had done, never choked off my writing by competing with myself, or with anybody else for that matter. My ambition was absolutely centered on the work itself, never on what it would bring me, or "who" it would make me. I never cared about that at all.

I like to receive money for my work. But I can pass that up this time. I like to have people know my work is done by me. But I can pass that up. I like to have tenants made happy by my work. But that doesn't matter too much. The only thing that matters, my goal, my reward, my beginning, my end is the work itself. My work done my way. Peter, there's nothing in the world that you can offer me, except this. Offer me this and you can have anything I've got to give. My work done my way. A private, personal, selfish, egotistical motivation. That's the only way I function. That's all I am.

I guess I could say that I pursue questions that interest me in ways that interest me on the page, but that's awfully vague.

I never think about what others are doing. I do a film for myself, not others.

The way to write is well, and how is your own business.

One doesn't make art for other people, even though I am very concerned with the viewer.

I don't write for publishers, certainly not for critics, and not for readers, But I am delighted that so many people have found my books enjoyable and want to continue to read them.