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"I wrote for a weekly magazine and then edited a literary magazine, but I did not really feel comfortable with the profession of journalism itself."
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"The two keys to success as a sportswriter are: 1) A blind willingness to believe anything you're told by the coaches, flacks, hustlers and other "official spokesmen" for the team-owners who provide the free booze ... and: 2) A Roget's Thesaurus, in order to avoid using the same verbs and adjectives twice in the same paragraph.Even a sports editor, for instance, might notice something wrong with a lead that said: "The precision-jack-hammer attack of the Miami Dolphins stomped the balls off the Washington Redskins today by stomping and hammering with one precise jack-thrust after another up the middle, mixed with pinpoint-precision passes into the flat and numerous hammer-jack stomps around both ends...."
"Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive."
"The Washington Times wrote a story questioning the authenticity of some of the suggestions made about me in Silent Coup. But as a believer in the First Amendment, I believe they have more than a right to air their views."
"Writers are the lunatic fringe of publishing."
"It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers, and when powerful abusers are taken on, there's always a bad reaction. So we see that controversy, and we believe that is a good thing to engage in."
"If you're curious, you'll probably be a good journalist because we follow our curiosity like cats."
"I've created a vocabulary of different styles. I draw from many different ways to take a picture. Sometimes I go back to reportage, to journalism."
"Honestly, I expected to get a cold reception because of my subject matter. But when editors took a look at the story I had to tell, and saw that this was not a parochial story at all, they really warmed to it."
"What passes for investigative journalism is finding somebody with their pants down - literally or otherwise."
Explore more quotes by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
"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."
"A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader."
"The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters."
"I don't much believe in the idea of characters. I write with words, that is all. Whether those words are put in the mouth of this or that character does not matter to me."
"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."
"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."
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