90 Quotes by Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity.

If the sleep of reason produces monsters, what does the sleep of unreason produce?

[]no hay dos miradas a una mujer desnuda iguales, no hay dos desnudeces exactas, como no existe las misma ave a cazar, aunque haya sido cazada antes, escapada y vuelta a cazar en el mismo sitio, el momento las hace diferentes.

La memoria es una traductora simultánea que interpreta los recuerdos al azar o siguiendo un orden arbitrario: nadie puede manipular el recuerdo y quien crea que pueda es aquel que está más a merced del arbitrio de la memoria.

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter

It means that no matter what you write, be it a biography, an autobiography, a detective novel, or a conversation on the street, it all becomes fiction as soon as you write it down.

Watching a movie from beginning to end is like reading, because even though what you see are images, they are telling you a story

My mother had been educated at a convent, and she had been converted to communism by my father during Stalin's most rampant period, at the beginning of the 1930s. So she had two gods, God in heaven and god on earth.