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"When I write, I enjoy myself so much that what is being written really needs no reader."
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"Great is the difference betwixt a man's being frightened at, and humbled for his sins."

"It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad."

"The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down."

"To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved."

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."

"And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness."
Explore more quotes by Guillermo Cabrera Infante

"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."

"I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself."

"I first came out against Castro in June 1968, fifteen months after my book had been published, and you cannot imagine how quickly a void was created around me."

"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."

"There were influences in my life that were more important than journalism, such as comic strips and radio."

"I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship."

"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."

"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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