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"I was able to read a movie before I was able to read a book."
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"She'd obviously read the book many times before, and so she read flawlessly and confidently, and I could hear her smile in the reading of it, and the sound of that smile made me think that maybe I would like novels better if Alaska Young read them to me."

"Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time."

"A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual."

"No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting."
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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Well, I write in exile because I cannot return to my country, so I have no choice but to see myself as an exiled writer."

"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."
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