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"The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters."
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"Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal."

"Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists."

"I'd be somewhat of a lousy writer if I didn't know what to say."

"A true piece of writing sets you free."

"A writer travels through the heart again and again to express the beauty of its contents."

"The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper, chop them, erase them, pulverise them and start again. Don't whine when things are not going your way, because they are going the right way for The Book, which is more important. The show must go on, and so must The Book."
Explore more quotes by Guillermo Cabrera Infante

"That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all."

"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."

"For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page."

"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."

"I left my country because I was forced to, and I do not think that I am going to lose my language because I live in England."

"When I write, the first blank page, or any blank page, means nothing to me. What means something is a page that has been filled with words."

"What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading, a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other."
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